A note about Star

Stubbles uses star files for its releases. All classes of the framework are bundled in one file which can be found in lib/stubbles.php of the release, created by the build process.

Star, which is short for STubbles ARchive, has been developed by the Stubbles Development Team as an alternative to PHP_Archive, also known as phar, with inspirations from the XP-framework's xar files. This file format allows us to put all code related files (classes, xml resource files, etc.) into one file for a release. Started as an experiment it turned out to be a very easy-to-use solution for the release process and to lower the needs for setting up a working version of the framework. As a drawback to this, the net.stubbles.star package has no solid unit tests and is merely a hackish solution.

On Feb 6th 2007 Greg Beaver introduced the pecl extension for phar files. This contains a lot of stuff which removes the drawbacks we found with the PEAR solution, especially a solid phar documentation will be available soon. Currently the pecl extension is in beta status. The release of phar as pecl extension marks a major milestone in our strategy towards our release process and the way we will ship our releases.

We will continue to work with the star format for the forthcoming months. However, star can be described as soon-to-be-deprecated. As soon as the pecl module has a stable release and will be shipped as default enabled module with PHP we will switch to phar files. Furthermore, there will be no official release of star to create your own star archives. However, you can checkout Stubbles from SVN and build your own star reader and writer with phing -Dpackage star. We only recommend doing this for building applications on top of Stubbles.