Release Party: PHP_Archive, PHP_LexerGenerator, PHP_ParserGenerator, PEAR

Just now, I released new versions of PHP_Archive, PHP_LexerGenerator, PHP_ParserGenerator, and Pierre released a new version of PEAR.

PHP_Archive 0.8.0 significantly alters the format of .phar archives so that they are a lot faster, and are also completely compatible with the phar extension in PECL.  There will probably be a few more internal changes before we go to beta, in order to support some important possibilities inside the phar extension.  This release also adds PHP_Archive_Manager, a class that can be used to debug dump the contents of a phar archive independent of the PHP_Archive code, which is very handy for debugging corrupted archives or other problems of that nature.

PHP_LexerGenerator/PHP_ParserGenerator are the PEAR incarnations of packages I have been blogging about.  A few days ago, they were approved with 10+ votes from the PEAR community, and now PHP has a great set of lexer and parser generators that can be used for some sophisticated stuff.  I've almost finished adapting the PHP_Parser package to take advantage of the new packages, and I'm within shooting distance of a docblock parser based on these packages and the pecl/docblock extension.  Once these are finished, it will make phpDocumentor 2.0 a much closer target, and in fact will probably not really warrant a major version increment, as I think we can keep backwards compatibility while offering the new parsing.

PEAR 1.4.10 has a few important bugfixes in it, but is largely unchanged.  In other words, it's REALLY stable and well worth the download.

Have fun!