Earlier in the month I asked for feedback on the super-alpha MARC package for PHP. Most of the responses I received were along the lines of "Sounds great!" but there hasn't been much in the way of real suggestions for improvement. In the mean time, I've figured out (with Lukas and Pierre's assistance, merci beaucoup) how to make use of PEAR::ErrorStack for error handling. I've also decided to split my linked-list-in-PHP implementation into a separate package; first, because it might be useful for someone else; second, because as a separate package the PHP gurus that care deeply about things like returning references can go over it with a fine-toothed comb without having to worry about all of the MARC stuff.
So, once again I'm interested in your comments -- but this time I'm looking for comments on two different packages:
Next steps are to build real PEAR packages for these beasties and put together PEAR proposals for consideration of the community... but don't feel that you have to wait until the proposal to offer any suggestions!
I will put up .phps versions of the examples for each package, but for some reason I'm having problems getting my host to accept my .htaccess file... look for an update on the respective pages after I contact my hosting support team.
Have you look at the MARC packages in perl for api ideas?
http://search.cpan.org/search?query=MARC&mode=dist
-- Clayton "your cousin" Scott
Being able to iterate through the fields of a MARC record object, and then iterating through the subfields of a MARC field object, just feels so right and so natural... Right now I'm trying to keep the API small and clean to ensure that the core functionality is absolutely stable, but if need be I can expand it with some convenience functions later.
In fact, in the next release I will have removed a couple of methods from the API. That's just the way I roll!