Second release in two days! Amazing how "employed" I am, after having quit Zend. ;-)

Solar is a simple object library and application repository for PHP5. It is framework-and-library for web-application development, with an emphasis on distribution, localization, and database portability. You can download it via a PEAR channel and browse the Subversion repository.

Here are some highlights from the change notes:

  • The PEAR installer is still the recommended means of installing and upgrading Solar, but it is no longer required. You can now download the pearball directly, place the files manually, and they'll work just fine.
  • Solar/Layouts has moved to Solar/App/Layouts.
  • There are no more app-specific Public/ directories; instead, all public resources for Solar apps are in Solar/App/Public/, and are broken down by images/, scripts/, and styles/.
  • Solar_Filter has more methods, and the names have changed (see the change notes for full details).
  • Solar_Valid has changed some method names (see the change notes for full details)
  • Solar_Controller_Front::_setup() no longer registers sql, user, and content objects; these registrations have been moved down to the Solar_App page controller to lazy-load them as late as possible.

Of particular note, the Solar_Form form processor, and the related Solar_View_Helper_Form class, combined with the new default.css file, now highlight the feedback messages differently based on the form status (i.e., validation "success" or "failure").

I have also updated the solarphp.com site with the new documentation, and the new doc-reading infrastructure. It's mostly technical API documentation, but there are some actual tutorial pieces in place. Also, for now, this means no more user-comments on the site, but I'll keep the existing ones and put them back once I build a new commenting app.

The next major tasks are to refine the Solar_Sql_Select column deconfliction logic, and/or add Solar_Sql_TableRow and _TableRowset classes, perhaps to replace Solar_Sql_Result.

After that, I'll be ready to move Solar out of "development" to an alpha or even beta status. That will be a happy day. :-)

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