A phar is to PHP what a jar is to Java. I spent a little time to see how easy it would be to make our latest eZ Components release into a workable phar.

He includes the few lines of code to make a package (four in his case) and a one-liner on how to use it in your application. Building the package is as easy as running a PHP command line call.

Others in the community have picked up on Derick's post and have checked into phar themselves - Sebastian Bergmann and Stuart Herbert (on benchmarking phar).

Last Thursday, during the Open Nordic Conference 2008 eZ Systems handed out its annual awards again. For the eZ Components award, there were four nominees, which are all recognised for their support of the eZ Components project.

Nominees included Stefan Marr and Falko Menge, James Pic, Andreas Schamberger and Freddie Witherden. The winner was James Pic for his work with the upcoming MVC additions to the component framework.

Now that I am actually using the Zend Framework on my first project, hitting bugs/limitations in Zend_Feed and therefore looking at the code, I must say I am seeing feature duplication with internal PHP features that does not quite fit in with the KISS principle.

He points out a few things that illustrate his point - the use of Zend_Http_Client instead of a strea context, passing XML contents into loadXML instead of just load. As a replacement, he's considered a Feed component from the eZ components system, but it hasn't been released (officially) yet. So, as an alternative, he's come up with a patch to fix a few things in the Zend_Feed component to make it a bit more KISS-friendly.

On the website you now find a picture of the book in a very prominent place and an extensive recension (German) linked from there.

You can find out more about the book and pick up your own copy from Amazon.

Version 1.2 of the Workflow component that is part of the eZ Components adds support for the Cancel Case workflow pattern:

Once this Workflow pattern is called the complete Workflow instance is removed from the current execution (including any running nodes). You can find out more about the ezWorkflowNode in their documentation.

Today we released the next version of eZ Components. In this release, there are two new components.

These two new components are:

• Tree - enables you to create, manipulate and query tree structures (with multiple compatible backends for gathering the data from)
• Webdav - allows for the quick and easy setup of a WebDAV-enabled server.

You can find out more about these components and many more included in the component library at the project's website (as well as this latest download).

I was honored when Tobias asked me several months ago if I not only wanted to be their technical reviewer but could also write a foreword for them. I'm so glad he asked.

He mentions that he enjoyed writing the foreword for the book and how he'd worked with the authors on reviewing the book. Of course, he's proud of the end result and recommends the book to anyone looking to start off with the eZ Components framework. The book is still only available in German, but Martin mentions there's already rumors of an English version on the horizon.

We've just released the first alpha version of the new eZ Components release, for which the full version is due to be released somewhere next month. There are two new components, but also many improvements to existing components. The new components are: Tree and Webdav.

The Tree component makes working with tree-based structures (via two tieins for the component - TreeDatabaseTiein & TreePersistentObjectTiein) and the Webdav component allows for the quick and easy addition of WevDAV functionality to your application.

Derick Rethans comments:

he website will be enhanced with other features, such as dedicated RSS feeds, case studies, links to external articles and more. Together with the new website the project also gets a new logo, of which you can see one variant right in this post.

This new logo is on the new website as well as being available for download in a variety of useful formats.

As you can see [below], we already got some examples and hope that everybody who ordered in advance got their examples by now, too. If you don't, stay tuned they should arrive soonish. We are both absolutely amazed by the printing quality and the overall impression of the book.

To win your own copy of the book (German) head over to this quiz page on the DynamicWebPages.de website and answer three simple questions.