In this new post to his blog Henri Bergius takes a step back and wonders if PHP is finally getting an ecosystem of its own (and not leaning of those of PHP-based projects.

One of my main concerns with PHP has been the lack of ecosystem. Almost all libraries and tools are written with a specific framework in mind, creating separate ecosystems around Drupal, Zend Framework, Midgard and others instead of an ecosystem benefiting all users of the language. There have been efforts at this, like PEAR before, but they have mostly stagnated.

These thoughts were spurred on by a post about the changes happening with eZ components (into Zeta Components) and how they can help reinforce the strength of the language rather than the efforts of one specific project's ecosystem.

In response to the (now somewhat infamous) post from Fabien Potencier about templating in PHP and comparisons of his own templating system (Twig) with various other offerings around the community, Thomas Koch notes that the eZ Components template is not slow and that maybe Fabien just wasn't using it correctly.

Dear Fabien, I think it's not fair to blog a benchmark without publishing the code you used to do the benchmark! But even without the code and without doing my own benchmark, I can offer some explanations, why eZ Components may have been the slowest in your benchmark and why you've compared apples with oranges.

He includes a few code examples - both from Twig and the eZ Components - and how they compare in terms of how the templates are made, what they're parsed into and things that could cause a difference in performance between the two.

Stefan Koopmanschap has a suggestion for developers out there using frameworks - don't limit yourself to just one framework, think more cooperative.

Most developers seem to limit themselves to a single framework. Be it Zend Framework (more popular than I even thought), be it symfony, there's even still a huge amount of custom "we built it because we have our own needs" frameworks out there, even in companies doing things similar to any other web development company out there.

He recommends looking around at other frameworks (usually the component-based ones work best) to see if there's something that could help you out when your primary falls a bit flat. Don't force yourself to stick with one just because it's "the company standard" - branch out and pull pieces from other frameworks and avoid the "redundant rewrite syndrome" in your code.

Tobias Schlitt has written up a new post looking at the identity pattern (an Enterprise application design pattern) and an implementation of Identity Map in the eZ Components framework.

The pattern affects the data access layer of an application and helps to avoid inconsistencies in data objects of your application. [...] In this article I want to give you a rough overview on the pattern itself and show you how you can test and use the functionality of PersistentObject.

The identity map pattern allows you to store/fetch objects across execution instances to reduce the overhead of recreating those objects every time. Tobias shows off the PersistentObject component as an example of it in action. It can create an identity map and store values (like session information in their example) and even includes methods to grab related objects as defined by calls to addRelatedObject.

The eZ systems group has released the latest edition of their PHP component system - eZ components version 2008.2.2.

This bug fix release addresses a few minor issues in the following components: Archive, Database, Document, Graph, Mail, PersistentObject, Search, Workflow and WorkflowDatabaseTiein. For details see the full change log.

eZ Components is an enterprise ready general purpose PHP components library used independently or together for PHP application development. With eZ Components, developers do not have to reinvent the wheel, instead they can concentrate on solving customer-specific needs.

You can either install/update through the project's pear channel or it can be downloaded directly from the site.

In a new post Tobias Schlitt looks at a part of the recently released eZ Components version 2008.2 that includes, among other things, Webdav support.

My tasks for 2008.2 were dedicated to the Webdav component. This package allows you to easily integrate WebDAV access features into your applications. With the earlier 2007.2 release, this component was born. By then, it supported just rudimentary WebDAV features (compliance class 1) and we focused on its architecture to make it as flexible as possible.

He explains how a commonly requested feature - locking - was implemented in the component. You can find out more about the feature/component in this article from Tobias on the eZ Components website.

eZ Components, the enterprise-ready library of PHP components (that can be used together or separately for PHP applications has made a new release candidate available for download:

The eZ Components team just released a release candidate of the new 2008.2 release. This release candidate resolves a couple of issues that where found during the testing and review process. The release candidate can be installed by running the following command: pear upgrade ezc/ezcomponents

You can also download the full package from the downloads page on the eZ Components site. Check out the release announcement for more information on whats been updated.

Derick Rethans phar. More specifically, he tried it out on the eZ Components framework, trying to make a complete release package.

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).

Recently the eZ Systems group had their eZ Awards ceremony at this year's Open Nordic Conference 2008. Derick Rethans has a brief post about the ceremony and the nominees/winner of the eZ Components award.

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.

Lukas Smith recently posted about issues he's been coming across with the "KISS" mentality (and code) that the Zend Framework implements, specifically for the Zend_Feed component.

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.