Martin Geisler Online

I’m done with the gymnasium — I had my final exam two days ago. It was in mathematics and I got 11. All-in-all I must say, that I’m very pleased with the exams. My average grade is 10.5 which means that I have access to whatever study I would like to try. But it really doesn’t matter, since there isn’t any limits on Computer Science. Everybody that wants to give it a try is let in, because there’s too few applicants.

But I now have two months of spare time before I’ll start at the Department of Computer Science in Aarhus (DAIMI). It’s just so great to be able to relax after the last four weeks.

Now that I have all this spare time, I hope to make a release of the new and improved PHP Weather version 2.x. You can try the snapshot or the latest code directly from CVS. And if you haven’t noticed yet, then I’ve moved the tarballs and zip-files to SourceForge, so you should go here if you want to download it.

You’ll also find that the stable version of PHP Weather has jumped to 1.55. The only new feature is support for proxyservers. So if you’ve been needing that, be sure to upgrade. You’ll have to set three variables at the top of phpweather.inc to enable the support.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve made a CVS-release of PHP Weather. This means that you can try out the latest code, even if you don’t have a machine with CVS installed.

I’ve been quite busy lately, and since my exams starts next month, I’ll have lots of things to do… But luckily, people are beginning to join the project at SourceForge and I hope we’ll be able to make a nice little webpage at http://phpweather.sourceforge.net.

I’ve decided to move PHP Weather to SourceForge. You can find it here. This should give us a lot of nice features. One of the best features is the CVS repository. By using CVS, you can ensure that you’re always up-to-date with the latest development — you no longer has to wait until I release a new tarball.

I’ve set up two maillinglists: PHPWeather-devel and PHPWeather-checkins, which you should use instead of the old list here at gimpster.com. The first list is for discussions and questions. When something is committed to CVS a mail is sent to the second list. Go to this page to subscribe.

People who would like to have write-access to the CVS repository should send their SourceForge usernames to me, together with an explanation.

I’ll update phpweather.sourceforge.net just as soon as I get the time.

The newest beta of PHP Weather is out, take a look here. It fixes some small problems with some missing strings.

I’ve rewritten PHP Weather, so that it uses objects. And it actually works, so I think we’re almost done for version 2. You can download it here.

I sent a mail to the maillinglist, but here it is as well:

I’ve also tried to write some documentation for the new version, which is included in the tarball. I used a php-script called PHPDoc. It works by reading comments in the code, and then build HTML-pages with that information.

It’s not finished yet, but I think we’re getting really close now. The main advantages of this structure is:

• It is easy to add support for new database-engines. Basically they just have to support three methods: insert_metar(), update_metar() and get_metar().

  I’ve made a database-engine called ‘none‘ which doesn’t do anything, and one called ‘mysql‘ which is fully working. I hope that someone will write an engine for PostgreSQL, dbm etc.

• The translators are able to override the output-routines, if that is necessary. And at the same time, most languages only need to translate the English language-file, just like old times :-)

  I’ve made an English language-file. It’s probably missing some strings, since I changed the keys in the $strings-array quite a bit while I was coding. When a string is missing, PHP complains about an undefined index. If you get such an error, then please report it to this list.

I know that there’s still some problems with getting it to work under PHP3, which should be solved. We’ll have to try and identify the cause of these problems, and then make a fix.

So, what do you think? Is it any good? Please report any failures and successes you get — thanks.