It looks like PHPLIB is making some drastic changes. First… they are going to become PEAR compliant. Then, they will begin being distributed as part of PEAR. In addition, IT and IT[X] (the PHPLIB Template engines) are being removed and all PHPLIB users are being encouraged to use XML/XSLT equivalents within PHP.
I don’t really use PHPLIB any more…. but I am sad to see it take this route. Not the PEAR route, but the removal of their template engine. I think PEAR is a good idea. And the template system in PHPLIB is not that great. But I hate to think that NEW PHP developers are going to be forced (basically) into not only learning PHP, but learning XML and XSLT. Sure.. this stuff is the wave of the future, but there are some instances where this is just overkill.
We’ll see what happens. In the interim, I am installing sablotron and the sablotron extensions for PHP4 in order to get a better understanding of how all of this works in PHP. Maybe it will end up not being so bad after all.
Unfortunately, the PHP4 Debian package maintainer has done something wrong with the PHP4 packages rendering using phpize and php-config to build dynamically extensible PHP modules impossible. For some reason, and I do not even pretend to understand linkers (ld and family), the sablot.so built via these tools generates a shared object library that PHP believes in not a true PHP library.
Maybe I’ll just have to build the whole thing by hand.