I'm Persian - PEAR

PEAR bash completion

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:06:55 +0430

Lately I've been playing alot with the PEAR CLI. The one annoying thing I noticed the most was its lack of tab completion that I'm used to from the shell. It turns out that this feature is very easy to add, in the bash at least. Here (Update: Now it's in PEAR SVN repository) is a simple tab completion script for the bash. In addition to completing the PEAR commands and their respective options, it can even autocomplete the names of installed packages and discovered PEAR channels. Just source it, and enjoy

PEAR without Pierre?

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:51:49 +0330

I can't imagine it.
He was the first (and the last) leader (hey, please dont start FUDs here in my blog comments, he was the PEAR leader imo) which puts so much effort to help the new developers or users and keep working in other parts of the project, He's the meaning of PEAR in my mind because he introduced me with PEAR world and now he's leaving, and will leave us alone here with a lot of FUDs from the men that don't know differences between PEAR as a Package and all of PEAR as a Group.

Updating PEAR Services_Ebay

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 09:07:30 +0330

As I posted earlier, I'm working on the PEAR package Services_Ebay. To update it to new eBay XML schema, I've done some of the Calls/Models/Examples and touched the request skeleton to be compatible with eBay's new schema and finally committed them to the PEAR CVS. But unfortunately I can't continue with this job as before. (hmm, US export restrictions and the fact that I'm an Iranian?)

I've just committed these changes to get attentions from other developers to help in the update process, this CVS version is just for this porpose and NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE.

If there's any interest on your part to help with this package, I've created a file named progress that indicates which parts of the package is updated and which one requires more efforts.

phpbitch

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:07:11 +0330

phpbitch finally bought a house!
If you're intrested in IRC and bots phpbitch could be a nice new friend.
There's an Installation Guide and more will be soon to follow.

phpbitch has a lot of modules, like:

Google: Search google right in your channel

Brain: Train it to answer user's questions or guide them

PHP Manual lookup: Get php functions info right whithin your channel

trac: integrate trac within your channel, tickets (status, description, time), commits (log message, author, time) and roadmap progress

and more ...

Feel free to create new tickets and feature requests.

P.S: I'm lending a hand on another PEAR Package, Validate.

PEAR Services_Ebay

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 19:45:41 +0330

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.

Net_SmartIRC & phpbitch

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:06:35 +0330

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