Actually Limb3 2007.4 was released on the 31st of the December 2007 but we(here in Russia) have 10 days of official holidays and I simply was too lazy to blog anything during those crazy days of champagne-with-vodka-fest-and-early-morning-hangovers

If you are wondering what Limb3 actually is and why world needs another PHP…er…framework(btw I hate this word too!), here’s a brief introduction. Limb3 is just a bunch of relatively independent packages, it is not a monolithic framework. Some packages are pretty unique(e.g {{macro}}) while others were inspired by cool stuff available for other than PHP platforms(e.g. active_record inspired by Rails’ ActiveRecord). And no, Limb3 was never intended to be “the one and the only one true PHP framework”. I personally believe in well thought code re-usability, thus the end application may contain bits of ezComponents, ZendFramework, PEAR, Limb3 and name-your-favorite-PHP-libraries-here.

Anyway, it’s better late than never, so here’s the list of the most notable changes made during past 6 months:

* ACTIVE_RECORD package: better invalid fields handling using
exceptions, support for different names of the primary key added
* CORE package: cruft cleanup, refactoring and misc. code
optimizations
* CACHE package: cleanup and better implementation, added
initial APC and Memcached support
* DATETIME package: major refactoring, renaming lmbDate into
lmbDateTime, etc
* {{macro}} alternative to WACT templating engine added with almost
all WACT alike functionality(and even more!)
* IMAGEKIT package: complete redesign using filters and fluent interfaces
* TESTS_RUNNER package: test groups and methods filters, better
coverage support
* JS package: upgraded jQuery to 1.2.1
* MAIL package: upgraded phpmailer to 1.73
* WEB_APP package: major cleanup, removed all commands and obsolete
controllers
* VIEW package: support for view selection based on template extension
added(currently MACRO and WACT)
* TREE package: ArrayAccess and ArrayIterator interfaces compatibility fixes
* FS package: more generic file system iterators added

Please note, this is rather a general changelog above, see the specific package changelog for more details.

The bundled release of all packages is available in the SourceForge downloads section of Limb3-2007.4

Although there are numerous improvements and fixes in this release, I’m especially proud of finally releasing the first version of {{macro}}(I blogged about it before). Sergei Yudin added so much needed (for real life projects) {{macro}} form and pager tags right before the release. And it looks like we are going to completely move from WACT to {{macro}} - we absolutely love the simplicity and flexibility of the new template engine.

Another point of interest is the stable release of limb/tests_runner-1.0.0(I blogged about limb/tests_runner-0.8.7 before and the new one is mostly a version bump). It introduced different test entities filters and fixed all test coverage issues.

However there’s a large fly in the ointment - we still don’t have good English documentation. Shame on us If you really want to try using Limb3 and don’t know where to start, you have several options then: a) look at the sample projects b) ask in the forum or limb-users mailing list c) have a look at the unit tests for each package.

I also planned to include more features into this release(like eager fetching support for active_record, CMS package, etc) but my current large project at the job would not have allowed me to do that. Maybe next release, who knows…

In any case, there was tremendous job done while pushing this release and I’d like to thank all contributors who helped us. Cheers, folks!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 1:28 am and is filed under limb, php. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.