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Sneak preview: 5.6.2RC1

There's been a lot going on here since 5.6.1 - six RFCs have been implemented, the new date functionality has been thorougly tested and fixed where necessary, and the FTP api has been basically revamped completely.

For you to be able to already test today, have a look at our release candidate 1 which can be downloaded here!

A new repository is born: XPForge!

Now that RFC #0139 has been implemented we have the beginning of a new infrastructure for software written using the XP framework's core and ports, but with their own release cycles and - in the future - with their own websites at xp-forge.net! Also, the XP framework's experiments have been moved to this new repository which you can check out using svn co svn+ssh://$(USER)@php3.de/home/svn/xpforge xp.forge.

RFC #0139: XPForge SVN

Scope of Change
A new SVN repository named "xpforge" will be created. It will contain projects and tools written using the XP framework and ports.

Rationale

• Separate ports (additional non-core packages) from real applications (such as dialog).
• Provide an infrastructure for release-cycles separate from core and ports.

Namespaces briefing

With the PHP internals' developers seemingly having agreed on integrating namespaces into PHP 5.3 (see http://news.php.net/php.internals/31930 and http://news.php.net/php.internals/31957), and after having discussing the topic with Frank from (Stubbles) and Alex (XP core dev) numerous times, I thought I'd start sharing our thoughts on this topic.

Facts and strategy

• Namespaces were intended to go into PHP 6 only in the beginning
• Some rogue developer backported the patch
• Namespaces are optional - that is, a PHP version with namespaces support is able to run non-namespaced code
• The XP framework would embrace namespaces once they're released officially
• Because mixing non-namespaced XP and namespaced XP will be tough on its internals, all the code would be migrated to use them, resulting in a new release
• Since quite a bit of core changes are needed, this release will have a new major number (currently, that would be 6.0.0)
• To ease migration and to give us the opportunity to provide bug fixes and releases for 5.x, an xp5 branch will be created. Active development will focus on XP6

Regenerate!

On a short note: If you update your XP checkout to SVN head and are using classes generated by the O/R mapping generator (ports/dist/databases/util/classgen), you will have to regenerate these classes or else they will not work any longer!

The change in the rdbms.Peer class' type member was introduced with the implementation of RFC #0107.

New core functionality "newinstance"

Now that RFC 0080: Anonymous class creation has been implemented, here's an overview of what can be changed for the better by using the newinstance() core functionality.

RFC #0091: XP Versions

Scope of Change
The XP framework will have a version number and versioning guidelines. This version number will be present in the XP's runtime XAR's filename.

Rationale
To easily be able to see when the framework changes.

Read the full RFC here

Heads up: Package restructuring

When RFC #0084: "Package cleanup" is implemented, lots of packages will change. After you update to the newest version some of your sourcecode will no longer work.

This article shows you how to fix the issues raised by this change.

Fix for the fix - bug #1 revisited

While searching for the origins of an SQLException which was occuring in our corporate Intranet, we discovered it had been caused by the numval() method introduced into the rdbms.StatementFormatter class a couple of weeks ago.

The problem was that numval() was being passed an empty string and was producing an empty string in return, causing "select ... from news where parent_id= %d" to be formatted to "select ... from news where parent_id= ", resulting in the afforementioned exception with the message "Incorrect syntax near ...".

The problem was that sscanf() returns -1 for empty input values and has been fixed now (see http://bugs.xp-framework.net/show_bug.cgi?id=1#c7 for details).

Package util.adt deprecated

With the implementation of RFC #0057 (see entry #87) the classes of the util.adt package have been deprecated.

Note: The old classes will remain in the codebase for the moment and can still be used, although they may not be used together with the new classes due name clashes resulting from PHP's lack of namespaces.

Continue reading for migration notes.

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