On the Debuggable blog Felix Geisendorfer points out a new scrap from their repository - one to interface with the Amazon Web Service.

Just wanted to let you know about a new addition to the debuggable scraps repository: An API for the Amazon Associates Web Service. Right now it's really just a simple wrapper to allow you to search their catalog since that was all I needed for now.

You can download the scrap and easily integrate it with your app - he includes some sample code to show you exactly how.

Continuing in his series looking at the construction of a blogging application with the Zend Framework, Padraic Brady has posted a quick new item pointing out the subversion repository for the project if you'd like to follow along:

You should all see a few commits commencing at the weekend. Probably all in one go since I largely have a standard skeleton I use already. [The URL is] http://svn.astrumfutura.org/zfblog/.

He's working live on it so things might break from time to time, but at least you can keep up with his thoughts and ideas on methods for some of the common blogging tasks.

You can find the first two parts of the series here - Part 1 and Part 2

Akash Mehta has pointed out five "PEAR gems" that can help you get your code up and running faster - some helpful bits of code to help you deal with some common issues.

Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it's hard to tell what you want when you don't know what's available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful.

The five that made his list are:

• Service_Akismet
• HTTP_Request
• Archive_Tar
• Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
• XML_Parser

In a new post to his blog, Travis Swicegood talks about design patterns, specifically the use of the Repository style in an application:

Josh [Eichorn] argued at the time that dealing directly with the database was a better option. [...] His argument won me over, and until this past week I've viewed that as probably the most sane way to go. [...] Now, what started out as the simplest solution has morphed into this unrecognizable mishmash of SQL, code and convention.

He points out some of the issues that this sort of approach can bring up and how the Repository patten can help to make it a bit more manageable. It makes it simple to add the parameters needed for the query (via filters).

In his latest post, Padraic Brady takes a look at PEAR in a verb form - both in how you can use it and what sorts of things it has in store.

over the last few months after finally getting over my ignorance of PEAR beyond it being a hodge podge of packages of dubious quality I've been questioning whether pearifying my future and past code is worthwhile. The answer is a resounding YES.

Unfortunately, there are some barriers for most people to get into the PEAR world (including the lack of the "coolest packages") with some of the perceived barriers including:

• PEAR will require large scale changes to my shiny new cool code
• PEAR only allows proposals for complete functional code
• PEAR is elitist
• PEAR is fossilised

He also talks about PEAR packages and dispels one of the most popular myths about the package repository - "you can't use PEAR on a shared host".

David Coallier has a quick hit post today on his blog. In it, he shows how, with a little bit of SimpleXML magic, to parse the log files from your Subversion installation.

Yesterday I was struggling trying to get svn log to display the results for a certain user and this was very annoying.. then I jumped on #svn on freenode, and someone mentionned svn log --xml

This apparently made my life much much easier with this simple script I have pulled in a couple minutes.

He includes the script and a brief set of instructions on how to use it in your installation.

Richard Thomas has officially released his first version of his jQPie software he's been developing.

Svn code had some issues in IE, this has been cleared up. New dynamic table sorter added and overall code cleaned up. Table sorter was redone from the ground up and is now a complete rewrite from my original demo code I used as the base.

He's looking for other developers out there that are interested in making the port of the PHP part to other languages (the "slices of pie" to make it portable). If you're interested, go grab the latest version from his SVN repository.

In a new post to his blog, Robert Swarthout about a PHP frontend he's been developing for working with Subversion repositories:

The frontend needed to be designed in such a way that each developer could access their working copies and make the full range of actions against them. I decided to also use an AJAX setup so that pages would be quickly loaded and updated by a single toggle of a folder.

A few issues popped up, including tracking edits correctly through the interface. His solution revolved around an Apache MPM that could serve different pages to different users and groups. With this solution in place, the functionality could be built up, a list of which he provides including:

• create working copy from repository (svn checkout)
• svn blame
• svn delete
• search files (via a grep/find combination, omitting .svn folders)
• svn rename

David Coallier looks yet again at his method for using the Zend_Db module of the Zend Framework without having to use PDO to connect to your database. Due to the large amount of interest in the development, he's created a subversion repository to give developers the latest version:

Well that's right, over the past couples weeks I have received emails, have seen comments and bug reports on my blog about the package I started couple weeks ago that let anyone use the Zend Framework without having to use the PDO extension. [...] I have decided to setup a new svn repository related to it.

You can access the main repository for the latest downloads here: http://dev.agoraproduction.com/zend/svn.

In a new post to his blog, Matthew Weir O'Phinney talks about automating a process to help keep a friend up to date on the latest release of the Zend Framework.

I was recently working with someone who was using Zend Framework in their project. To keep things stable and releasable, he was doing an export of framework into his repository and checking it in.

Since files change so much in the ZF project currently, instead of doing an rsync from a checkout into his own repository, he decided instead to delete the directory from the repository and re-add it everytime he was updating framework.

His solution involved the use of the svn:externals property to grab only what's really needed. He also includes the steps/configuration that he used to grab just what he wants. Handy little feature of Subervsion...