Zeta Components retired from Apache

First published at Tuesday 29 May 2012

Warning: This blog post is more then 12 years old – read and use with care.

Zeta Components retired from Apache

For the last two years we tried to get the Zeta Components project (formerly known as Apache Zeta Components, formerly known as eZ Components) going inside the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Due to time constraints of the main contributors we sadly never managed to really get the project kickstarted.

Some weeks ago we finally decided to retire the project from the ASF. We moved the code to Github, where all components are now available under the zetacomponents organization: https://github.com/zetacomponents

The Zeta Components projects includes some unique & beautiful pieces of PHP code. And I hope we will now get some contributions back. I know that there are still a lot of people using components from this project.

Since there is no formal organization behind this project any more, we moved to maintainer-centric approach, where each component has a dedicated maintainer. This also means that we cannot enforce any standards across all components any more, but each component follows what it maintainer thinks is best. Feel free to fork, though. :)

I will mainly continue to maintain my two babies:

  • The Graph component

    A component to draw various types of diagrams, using different output drivers and extensible on about any layer.

  • The Document component

    A component to convert between different text formats, like: ReStructured Text, HTML, Docbook (subset), PDF, ODT, various wiki markup languages, …

Just like before I will try to maintain backwards compability at any costs -- I still think this is one of the most important aspects for libraries and tools. If not the most important aspect.

I already got the tests working again in the Graph component (broken because of internal changes in PHPUnit), but several other components need some love, too. Contributions are very welcome.

Installation

Thanks to the migration efforts by Benjamin (Thanks a lot, buddy) all components are now installable via composer and are available on packagist. Just add a dependency on the package, like: zetacomponents/graph and run composer.phar update. See more in the composer-docs: http://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md

Also thanks to Benjamin the website is up and running again, containing the tutorials and API documentation: http://zetacomponents.org

Contributing

Contributions will now mainly focus on Github as a collaboration platform. But additionally Derick was so kind to set up a mailing list. You can find it here: zeta@lists.xdebug.org -- to subscribe: Send an email to ecartis@lists.xdebug.org with the subject "subscribe zeta".

Running the tests

If you want to run the tests for contributing, this is also easy. Just do the following:

# Install composer, you might skip that, if already installed wget http://getcomposer.org/composer.phar # Install all component (development) dependencies php composer.phar install --dev # Run the tests phpunit

Afterwards the usual Github workflow applies:

  1. Fork project on Github

  2. Commit to your fork

  3. Create pull request

Let's try to get all this up and running again. It would be too sad if all this great code would be lost.

Subscribe to updates

There are multiple ways to stay updated with new posts on my blog: