[Oai-pear-devel] PEAR::OAI 0.4.0 Released

[Sandro Z. <san...@zz...>]

The PEAR::OAI developers team is happy to announce the immediate availability 
of PEAR::OAI 0.4.0.

Please notice these important changes:
- PEAR::OAI server reduced to only care about protocol layer, content response 
is created by backend
- more documentation, now edited online in a Wiki at 
http://www.zzoss.com/phpwiki/index.php/PearOai

### Description ###

PEAR::OAI is a PHP class library for the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for 
Metadata Harvesting (http://www.openarchives.org). This library provides a 
Server (= Repository) and in the future also a Client (= Harvester) 
interface. This package is conformant to and makes use of PEAR 
(http://pear.php.net) classes.

### Featurs ###

- full OAI-PMH version 2.0 compliance (tested with OAI Repository Explorer)
- easy and flexible configuration (well documented)
- modular data backend system allows plug-in of several data storage 
interfaces that wrap different data structures
- integrated template output system to provide arbitrary metadata format 
output, provided as a plugin module
- compressed XML support, which greatly reduces used bandwidth
- garbage collection of resumption tokens (via PHP session functions)
- resumption token sessions can be stored in filesystem or database
- checking expiration date of resumption tokens
- debug mode to track errors in logfile
- object oriented PHP
- PEARDoc (~JavaDoc) inline documentation

### Changelog ###

New Featurs:

- PEAR::OAI server reduced to only care about protocol layer, content response 
is created by backend
- modular plugin architecture for various types of backends provided by 
different vendors
- modular plugin architecture for markup output
- getRecord takes metadata prefix as argument
- moved methods for identifier masquerading to backend abstract class 
(Server/Backend.php)
- check if backend supports a certain method
- split descriptions (e.g. friends) from Identify.tpl to separate templates
- new helper class for template parsing (Server/Output.php)
- using static oai prefix when dealing with masquerading (better performance)

Bugs fixed:

- renamed Server/tpl/ListIdentifiers_oai_dc.tpl to 
Server/tpl/ListIdentifiers.tpl because there is no output specific to a 
metadata format
- stripped off php version check in OAI_Base::xmlEncode() because we only work 
with PHP >= 4.2.0
- all XML output UTF-8 encoded

Miscellaneous

- replaced OAI_Base::recordStorage() with OAI_Server::backend()
- OAI_Server::backend takes instantiated backend object as argument
- deleted template_path option for OAI, instead, we have packages for output, 
located in the OAI/Output/ directory
- more documentation, now edited online in a Wiki at 
http://www.zzoss.com/phpwiki/index.php/PearOai

### Links ###

Find more information at http://www.zzoss.com/phpwiki/index.php/PearOai.