Max Horvath has called for some help in getting a feature included (and fully working) into the next release of the Eclipse PDT extension - phar support.

With Eclipse PDT 2.0 to be released in September (or October) support for namespaces is already on the roadmap. Support for Phar archives has not been listed, yet. But in my opinion Eclipse PDT 2.0 must support handling Phar archives when PHP 5.3 will hit the street.

He points out some of the current lackings that the Eclipse extension has including the inability to browse phar archives and that there is no way to debug the archives. He's opened a feature request for the functonality to be added and suggested fleshing it out on the wiki.

This is where you come in - he wants to know what sort of support that developers out there would like for phar in this next release. Just leave comments on his blog with your ideas.

Akash Mehta has pointed out five "PEAR gems" that can help you get your code up and running faster - some helpful bits of code to help you deal with some common issues.

Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it's hard to tell what you want when you don't know what's available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful.

The five that made his list are:

• Service_Akismet
• HTTP_Request
• Archive_Tar
• Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
• XML_Parser

Greg Beaver has blogged about an enhancement in the latest release of phar (1.2.1) - a major speed boost:

A few minutes ago, I released phar version 1.2.1. phar is a PHP extension that allows the creation of complete filesystems within a single physical file. In addition, a bootstrap stub written in PHP can be used to run a phar archive as if it were an executable file or shell script. Documentation on its usage and how to create phars is at http://php.net/phar in the PHP manual.

Greg mentions some other issues that were fixed and a refactoring of some of the stream operations to cut the speed in half.

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a (short) new tutorial showing an alternate method to creating a Zip archive in PHP (rather than with the zip extension).

He illustrates the creation of simple archive that pulls in a test file from a given path. This is then pushed into the zip archive and packed down and exported. He also notes the different compression levels that it can be created with - no compression, bzipped and gzipped.

You can download the library here.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial that focuses on the dynamic creation of zip archives in a PHP application.

PHP too has included support for the ZIP format since PHP 4.x but it was only recently when, idly browsing the PHP manual, I realized that PHP 5.2.0 includes a re-engineered version of the ext/zip extension, one based on the zlib library. Bored and not a little intrigued, I decided to try it out. And over the next few pages, I'm going to tell you what I found.

The tutorial does require that you have the zip extension installed before getting started. He starts with the basics (reading and opening a zip file) but quickly moves on to creating and decompressing them. All of the code needed is included of course, so you'll be up and working with your own zip files in no time.

Edin Kadribasic has posted the latest release of his helpful little patch for anyone needing the client libraries for MySQL on Windows - the version for PHP 4.4.3 and MySQL 5.0.22 libraries.

After the final release of PHP 4.4.3 here are the Windows binaries who need PHP compiled against newer version of MySQL libs.

The archive contains two files. Both of these files should be dropped in your existing php-4.4.3 install folder overwritting php4ts.dll and adding libmysql.dll.

You can download the file directly from here.

Pierre-Alain Joye has a new note on his blog today about the release of a new version of his Zip package and his efforts to get it included in the upcoming PHP 5.2.0.

I released zip-1.6.0 on wednesday. This release contains no bug fixes and no new feature. In the past weeks, many zip users asked me when I will bundle it in PHP. I cannot bundle extensions without asking the internals list. I steped in and ask to bundle it in 5.2.0, it was hard but finally sucessful.

For the inclusion, he's change the name of the archive to "ZipArchive" from just "Zip" in an effort to clarify what the package is for (archiving versus zip code related functionality).

Published today, PHPit.net shares this new tutorial highlighting the creation of ZIP and TAR archives dynamically with the contents of your choosing.

In this tutorial I will show you exactly how to do that. Thankfully there are two excellent libraries in the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) which makes it a lot easier since all the hard stuff has been written for us already.

You will also learn how to stream these dynamically created archives using the right headers so that the browser will know it's an archive, and not a normal PHP page.

With the help of the Archive_Zip package from the PEAR libraries, following the steps to create an archive is simple. They assume that you already have the PEAR setup installed on your system and can easily pull in the Archive_Zip package before starting the tutorial. They help you create a sample archive, show the steps to make an archive from a directory, fixing the directory paths to make extraction easy. They even compress it all into one function to make for easy reuse later on.

Richard Thomas of the Cyberlot blog has thrown together a piece of the Zend Framework mailing list that isn't there so far - the ability to search the archives. He's put together this search page to help with that matter.

Seems like the same question is asked every day, or the fact that you can't do it is complained about in one way or another so here it is.

Search the mailing list all you need ;) It only updates when I take the time to run the script so it will always be a few days behind.

A few days behind is still much better than nothing, and it looks like he's got quite a bit of the list already parsed.

In this new post on Greg Beaver's blog today, there's the announcement of the release of version 0.7.0 of his package, PHP_Archive.

As I blogged about earlier, PHP_Archive has been completely refactored both to reduce the size of the archive and to improve its efficiency tremendously.

This new release also opens up the possibility of making a .phar extension, something that would outperform PHP_Archive even more. Making it super-efficient will even allow running PHP apps right out of a .phar.

You can grab this latest release (0.7.0) from the package's PEAR page at http://pear.php.net/PHP_Archive...