PHP - 2

eBay developers program:

The popular PEAR Services_Ebay is not unified schema compliant. Unfortunately, the author of this package is currently unable to update it. If you are interested in migrating this code to our unified schema, please post a list on the "dev" mailing list to help coordinate our community efforts.

Well, when I saw the above I just decided to bring this popular package back to the production. After submitting some patches, Arnaud and Pierre (resp. QA and PEAR Group) decided to give me the lead and removed the "not maintained" state, so I'm its new lead

The blinking point in this package is, how it is written. An awesome piece-of code by Stephan Schmidt. (nothing weird, really shining)
eBay's legacy XML API was less nested and in result setters had a great role in this package, but now high-deep elements has made the role of setters colorless and when I (and PEAR) care a lot about the BC, I've forced to override in some Calls.
eBay has done the migration process easy with providing complete manuals for developers, and that makes the migration less harmful.
Nearly everything has changed in the new API, taken from authentification to the events tracker. Although struggling with it was (is) a real pain but it's my first deep experience with enterprise web-services, funny moments.

Another thing that I'm wondering about is, to write a new mozilla extension for browsing eBay. Thanks to XUL for providing tools for a great interface, XPCom for letting me do cross-domain JavaScript requests and finally E4X (so the extension would be a FF 1.5+ one).
I'm not eager to use eBay's SOAP web-service and then using built-in SOAP support, I want to use my experiences with XML API but this time in a completely different environment.

P.S: patches or feedbacks about PEAR Services_Ebay are welcome.

Well, here I'm going to write about a great library that didn't get enough attention as it deserves, I mean Net_SmartIRC, is a complete library that conforms to the RFC 2812 (IRC protocol).
These days (and surely prior than this) existing an IRC channel for each OpenSource project is common and if you have ever tried being a supporter there, after a short time you'll have users from around the world that asks one question sometimes and you (or the other staffs) should answer that time to time... what would happen if you had a bot that sits there in your channel and answered those repeated questions or at least point them to the relevant Wiki pages?
This library is enough for writing a bot but there's also a great framework (phpbitch) that has more features to and writing new modules for it isn't a pain..

P.S: EFNet's #pear bot (PEARgirl) is on top of phpbitch