The ZZ/OSS Installer Client (ZIC) for the Web browser will be released as a stand-alone application on December 15th. This is when the forthcoming issue of the International PHP Magazine ships with an article on the ZIC.

Currently, I am cleaning up the code base and I will later add some additional features. Alltogether, the ZIC should then be ready for use in PHP projects that want to profit from advanced packaging and release management, ensuring a high reusability of the application components.

These are some of the features of the ZIC:
– Provides a Web GUI aka installation wizard look and feel.
– Command line interface is under development.
– Allows definition of packages, applications, and distributions in XML.
– Automatic resolution of package dependencies.
– Tools for easier development of packages.
– Plugin framework for build routines (e.g. to set up or update a database from SQL dumps).
– Customization of HTML layout for in-house products.
– Supports full, minimal or customized installations.
– Allows for non-conflicting installation on shared hosts environments
– Installer can upgrade itself.
– Sources are LGPL licensed for greater flexibility in usage

Some known PHP developers have commented on the preview version of ZIC at this year’s Linuxtag:

Wez Furlong
Lukas Smith
Christian Stocker

My company partner Christian Zonsius is currently working on the ZZ/OSS Installer Server (ZIS) which forms the backbone of the envisaged deployment architecture for distributed package hosting. The ZIS will as well be released on December 15th, not as stable as the ZIC, but as a preview version for testing.

Both, ZIC and ZIS are based on concepts, ideas, and libraries that evolved within PHP’s PEAR community, namely the PEAR package manager and the PEAR Web. ZZ/OSS has extended these technologies, to make use of the defined standards and furthermore bring advanced release management to the application level (as compared to PEAR, where release management is only able on the package level of class libraries).