The PEAR blog has a recommendation for those that might not have updated their package udage in a while - there's been major changes in many packages, but two in particular.

We’ve had 60 releases since July. While most are often minor improvements or bug fixes; a number of packages really stand out. Net_DNS2, and HTTP_Request2. Each of these packages represents the second edition of their respective APIs; each having been honed over time to a point of stability.

Net_DNS2 gives you the ability to communicate and resolve host names/domain names inside of a PHP application. HTTP_Request2 gives you a simple way to perform HTTP requests.

Stuart Herbert has a new post to his blog today that shares some helpful hints about dependency quirks that can come with using PEAR packages and the PEAR installer.

To save myself a bit of effort, I thought it would make sense to make my API client reuse PEAR’s existing HTTP_Request2 component. No sense in re-inventing the wheel, I thought. But that’s where my troubles began. [...] There are a few quirks in the way that the PEAR installer handles version numbers, and you need to know how to deal with them if you’re going to re-use PEAR project components in your own apps.

He shows how a dependency can be set up for the HTTP_Request2 package as a part of the update to his project. He talks about changes to the project's package.xml file and the trick with version numbering to get the latest. In this case, the latest is a non-stable alpha/beta component and the package.xml file needs some special handling to cooperate there (version, stability, release, api and min/max).

The Zend Developer Zone has a new post from Vikram Vaswani about accepting credit card payments through Authorize.net in the OXID eShop CE (e-commerce platform).

Now, if you're planning to start an online store, it should be pretty clear that accepting electronic payments isn't an option - it's a necessity for you to compete effectively. And that's where this article comes in. Over the next couple of pages, I'll show you how to begin accepting credit card payments for your products using the open source OXID shopping cart and the Authorize.Net payment gateway...with, of course, a little bit of PHP to make things interesting!

The glue between the OXID install and Authorize.net is created with the PEAR HTTP_Request2 package. This combined with a little extra PHP code can be installed and used as a component directly inside the application. He gives full code and screenshots to help you get it up and running on your install.