NYCPHP Meetup

[Joel De Gan]

First: Thanks to all of you who jumped at the chance to help out with
php-gtk. It really is gaining steam and a lot of people are getting
involved and people are taking notice.

For those of you involved, you are already aware of this post. For those
of you not involved or if you are interested in using php-gtk, here is a
letter to the community by the php-gtk primary developer.
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/php-gtk-general/2122551

Here it is below as aspn is slow as nails half the time.
Shows where things are going.

Look forward to an active and blooming community around php-gtk.
Cheers.
-joeldg

[PHP-GTK] Letter to Community 
by Andrei Zmievski 
Jul 20 2004 4:57AM 
Dear PHP-GTK community,

I have just read the extensive "what is going on with gtk.php.net?" thread
that Steph has brought to my attention and I have to say this: I'm sorry. 
It is apparent there is an impression out there that PHP-GTK has been
relegated to the convalescence home of dying open source projects. Mostly it
is my fault, as I have been absent from the scene for entirely too long. All
I can say in my defense is that in the last year I had moved to another
coast, switched jobs, started a new relationship, and have generally been
busy pursuing other interests. Hopefully, you've been in the same situation
and know what I am talking about. Might not be much of an excuse, but that's
all I have at the moment.

Steph, in her infinite patience, has possibly been the only person who has
been investing any significant amount of time into PHP-GTK by fixing
the docs, answering emails on the mailing lists, and poking me from time to
time to find out when I would be back. For that, I think we all owe her
a debt of gratitude. Without Steph, this project would be quite dead indeed.

But, let me also say this: PHP-GTK has not and will not be abandoned. It has
been made clear from the thread that there are a lot of people in the world
using it for things that I, frankly, could not have imagined when I started
tinkering with the code almost 4 years ago. And seeing the renewed interest
in the project with the release of PHP 5 I cannot help but be inspired by
the energy that is suddenly circulating through our little community.

So, what's to be done? Clearly, the documentation is lacking. Obviously, it
is an enormous effort to document all the classes and methods that PHP-GTK
inherits from GTK+ in addition to its own idiosyncrasies. Simply linking
back to GTK+ manual is not a solution as that manual itself is quite
incomplete. So, what seems to me to be a good approach is to invest some
time and effort into either fixing the current documentation system and
continuing the course or rebuilding it to use Livedocs. Whatever we do, we
should probably be compatible with the PHP documentation project to
facilitate reuse of tools and technologies.

Everyone says that PHP documentation is simply great, but how did it get to
be so great? Through efforts of regular users and developers who
self-organized into teams of documentors, administrators, user note
maintainters, etc. Of course, the PHP doc project consists of many people,
but I remember when there were only a few folks who even knew how to build
the docs. We are basically in the same position right now, but we have the
advantage of hindsight and can draw on the best practices of PHP docs team
as well as learn from their mistakes.

Website can also be improved. Ben Ramsey has offered to work on it, and
I couldn't be happier to hear that. It would be even better if we had 2 or
3 people maintaining the web site as there is a lot of good PHP-GTK and GTK+
information out there that the website simply does not link to. It is, after
all, supposed to be the central repository of all PHP-GTK knowledge.
Improving search, moving Wiki to be hosted on gtk.php.net, and implementing
a semi-regular news system would be something to do as soon as possible.
Beyond that, I will leave the ideas for how the website should function best
to those willing to work on it through collaboration and consensus.
Borrowing ideas from php.net, go-mono.com, and other sites should not be
viewed as a bad thing.

This may sound familiar, but I think that my personal strength lies in
developing code, rather than designing web sites or writing documentation.
So far I have been waiting for PHP 5/Zend Engine 2 API to stabilize, and now
that PHP 5 has been released, I believe I can re-start work on PHP-GTK
2. However, it is not going to be a straightforward port of PHP-GTK 1
because Zend Engine 2 offers much better ways to exploit the power of
object orientation and we can build a very slick interface to GTK+ if we
start from scratch. I am going to start thinking about it and posting RFCs
on the mailing list in hopes of soliciting feedback from users as to how
this interface can be best structured. Consider the connect() and
connect_object() functions (a source of much confusion apparently): There is
no reason that the second one needs to be called connect_object() aside from
the fact that that is what GTK+ uses. So, one of the first questions will
be, do we stick to GTK+ API rigidly or do we replace/rename some methods to
suit us better?

As far as project structure goes, perhaps we could have 3 loosely organized
teams: development, website, and docs, each one headed by an informal
leader. I nominate Steph for the docs team which will probably leader to her
kicking my virtual butt. :-)

Well, I'd better wrap up. The recent activity on the lists makes me think
that people are willing to contibute to the project. Of course, how much
time we can contibute is the biggest issue. No one can make you share your
time, effort, and goodwill except yourself. I just hope that the ant analogy
holds and piece by piece, grain by grain, we keep building this project up.
As Ben said, let's not let the interest die out, And to paraphrase JFK, ask
not what PHP-GTK can do for you, ask what you can do for PHP-GTK. The
project cannot die until the last one of us loses interest in it.

Talk to you all soon,

-Andrei

Documentation is worth it just to be able
to answer all your mail with 'RTFM'. -- Alan Cox

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-- 
joeldg - developer, Intercosmos media group.
http://lucifer.intercosmos.net