Release notes

Version 1.3 beta 1a

This version does not include the examples. It is meant to run on both php4 and php5.

What's new

Since phpPeanuts 1.3.beta1

• pntUnit/Inspect.php include exploit fixed

Since phpPeanuts 1.2.0

• NtoMRelationDialogWidget looks like a normal DialogWidget, but instead of opening an ObjectDialog it will open an ObjectNtoMDialog that looks much like an ObjectMtoNPropertyPage.
• ObjectEditDetailsDialog allows to quickly create new objects in response to a 'New' button added to Object(MtoN)Dialoog and ObjectMtoNPropertyPage.
• ArchDate is a ValueObject (google for the patter) representing archaelological dates back to 50e9 bC. These can be stored as strings in a database, sorted by the database and selected using < etc.
• PntSqlJoinFilter can now be used to search for values navigating over 1 to m and m to n relationships (the last requires a path of three steps). A remark must be made that the combination of JOIN and GROUP BY it uses, if not optimized very well by the database, can be slow on large tables (simple search makes it vary easy to combine many filters, combining many filters navigating x to m relationships may not be a good idea)
• PntMarkedItemsCollector was factored out from ObjectDeleteMarkedAction makes it easy to collect the peanuts corresponding to items in an ItemTable from your own Action or Page class.
• SearchPage sorting.
  The sorting is done server side and will support multiple sort criteria. The user can set the sort criterium by clicking on a columnheader, or throough a dialog that supports multiple sort criteria. Each criterium can be selected from the same list of filters as shown in the advanced search and can be set Ascending or descending.
• SelectWidget can now be used for options of primitve types and is used for non-compulsory boolean properties to allow selection of null value.
• some refactoring and small changes, see changes.txt.

Portablility

This version is meant to run on both php4 and php5, the last with zend.ze1_compatibility_mode = On as well as Off. On php5 the code will not be free of E_STRICT notifications.

If you want your application code to be portable too it has to follow certain rules:

• only use php4 syntax, keywords and functions,
• allways assign or pass objects by explicit variable reference (&),
• use the functions from classes/pnt/php4Functions.php and php5Functions.php where applicable,
• don't change the zend.ze1 compatibilty mode after php5Functions.php has been included, it will not dynamically adapt to such a change.

Like phpPeanuts, code that follows these rules should be able to run with equal behavior without modification on both platforms, and on php5 with both zend.ze1 compatibility settings. However, there may still be differences in areas of php where phpPeanuts does not make use of. This may require some further wrapper functions to be added.

For object oriented application frameworks like phpPeanuts php5 is a much better platform than php4. However, some people are still using php4 as their deployment platform because some website hosting accounts do not yet support php5. PhpPeanuts up to the production release of version 1.3 will be compatible with php4. Next version of phpPeanuts will probably be for php5 only.

Known bugs and limitations

1. When an MtoNDialog is reopend after closing, the current values of the MtoNDialogWidget it was opened from are not reflected in the dialog. Patching this is not a big deal, look on the forum for a patch.
2. not tested with php5.1 and php5.2. From the upgrade guide we conclude that With php5.2 and up the following problems may occur:
   - E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR may be handled incorrectly by PntErrorHandler
3. Error page cause javascript error because it does not do scouting
4. Error page displays cause with double slashes
5. Column mappings may not be consequently applied. If you need to set a columnName different to the propertyName on an PropertyDescriptor, test your applications database persistence functionality thouroughly. (we don't use this feature ourselves. If someone is using it, please report on how it works and on bugs, otherwise this may never be resolved).
6. Reference Anomalies: Before the generic workaround was applied (introduced in 1.1 beta 1, released dd 16-11-2004), use of references by phpPeanuts occasionally made uninitialized php variables or associations arbitrarily hold values that seemed to come from another variable. This rarily happened and since the generic workaround it never happend again, so we recon this issue closed. However, it is impossible to guarantee that the problem has been eliminated once and for all. Do not use phpPeanuts for mission critical applications.
7. Though the framework has a class that is pointed to become the database abstraction layer, there is still quite some code that does not delegate to this layer, but will clearly have to delegate if phpPeanuts has to work on Oracle.
8. Testing with php 4.4 shows phpPeanuts triggers many notifications. PhpPeanuts intensively uses variable references. Some form of reference usage triggers notifications in php 4.4 where it did not in 4.3 and 5.0. With respect to references it is like php has broken with the principle of automatic type conversion: whenever a value has to be converted to a reference automatically, notifications are triggered. As a result all conversions would have to be made explicit in all phpPeanuts code if we want to avoid these notifications. This results in ugly code. When phpPeanuts will be targeting php5 only, we plan to eliminate variable references wherever possible. Then all that ugly code will have to be removed. This is too much work for just getting rid of some notifications in php4.4. In other words, this issue is not going to be solved, if you don't want these notifications (or if you don't want to be stuck on legecay platform), use php5.