[Rdfapi-php-interest] Introduction

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Hi all, 
 
Now that Chris has granted me write-access to the subversion tree, I
thought it would be nice to introduce myself. 
 
As a day job, I work at <a href="http://www.sara.nl/index_eng.html">SARA
Computing and Networking</a> in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This is a
non-profit organization, owned by the two Amsterdam Universities (<a
 href="http://www.uva.nl/">1</a>, <a href="http://www.vu.nl/">2</a>)
and the <a href="http://www.nikhef.nl/">Netherlands Institute for
Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics</a>. Among other things, SARA
maintains the Dutch National Supercomputer Facilities. My business card
says that I'm an "Advisor High Performance Computing". I believe that's
not even proper English, but who cares. I help scientists (mostly
biologists) in using our supercomputers and computer clusters. In my
spare time I volunteer at a <a
 href="http://www.petproducts.nl/dierenasiel/ahonden.html">dog shelter</a>. 
 
For one of my projects, I needed a good RDF library. I think Dave
Beckett's "librdf" or "Redland" is most widely used, but I didn't like
its interface, nor its bindings to the languages I use most (Perl,
Ruby, and PHP). Then I found RAP, started working with it, and liked
it. Over the last months, I've made quite a few modifications to my
copy of the source tree. Suffering from the "Not Invented Here"
syndrome like so many programmers, I've been playing with the thought
of writing a new PHP RDF library from the start, but I soon realized
that I can never build anything as complete as RAP on my own. So I'd
much better contribute to RAP! 
 
I've still only used part of RAP so far: the ResModel en OntModel,
database persistence (MySQL), the SPARQL engine (great job,
Christian!), and most of the parsing/serializing API. I haven't touched
the inference models yet, nor the RDQL engine, nor the stuff in the
'tools' or 'netapi' directories. Still much to discover, I guess. 
 
Having write-access to the source tree, I immediately have a whole
bunch of questions that I hope anyone would be willing to answer: 
<ul>
 <li>In there any "hierarchy" that I should be aware off? Is there
anyone in particular who leads the project? Is there some "board" that
reviews source submissions?</li>
 <li>Which versions of PHP are supposed to be supported? Is it allowed
to check-in PHP code that depends on PHP 5.2.x features, like for
example the magic __toString() method? Personally, I tend to cut as
much legacy as possible in my own projects, as long as users are
provided with a clear migration path away from deprecated/discontinued
features. 
 </li>
 <li>Is there some release-cycle that I / we should adhere to?</li>
 <li>Do I understand correctly that active development takes place on
the trunk? (Some other projects like to do this in branches, hence my
question. Personally, I like the everything-on-the-trunk approach best)</li>
 <li>Is there some latest-release-with-bugfixes branch to which I
should commit bugfixes, parallel to the trunk?</li>
 <li>I couldn't find a script to generate the PhpDoc documentation in
the subversion tree. Could tell me how (with which parameters) phpdoc
was invoked, in order to generate the phpdoc api documentation?</li>
 <li>I saw that Sourceforge offers the possibility to have a Wiki for
each project. Wouldn't it be a good idea if all the documentation were
transferred to a Wiki, so we can all collaboratively make changes? I'd
be more than willing to help with / perform such a transition.</li>
 <li>What's the policy regarding code changes that aren't backward
compatible? Are there plans for a new major version release that breaks
backward compatibility?</li>
</ul>
Well, that's probably enough for now. The extend to which a can
contribute to RAP depends largely on whether or not I'll keep using RDF
for my day-to-day activities. I'll push in that direction, but it's not
just up to me. I have a boss, too... 
 
Kind regards to all of you, 
Pieter van Beek 
 
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