Saturday, I will present the forthcoming ZZ/OSS Installer Client (ZIC) release 1.1.0dev1 at a PHP User Group meeting. I am looking forward to get some feedback from the participants. Soon after the presentation, the code will be released.

This is an excerpt from the changelog:

– works on Windows
– new plugins architecture (introduced Plugins Runtime Environment, which is actually installed like an application)
– integrated package manager for installed applications
– plugins manager for installer plugins
– plugins development wizard
– E_ALL support
– development applications can now also be installed
– new default theme ‘kde’ which is “neutral”
– option to automatically remove setup wizard after installation
– handle different magic quotes settings
– progress bar shows download process
– single packages or plugins can be added
– etc.

I am confident, that with this release, we have solved all major conceptual issues about a distributed deployment architecture. The important implementation missing, is the ZZ/OSS Installer Server (ZIS), which we have not yet released under an Open Source license. Once ZIS is out, companies and communities can easily deploy their applications consisting of packages within their software distribution – either in-house, and/or internally.

We will in the forthcoming months focus on the release of ZIS, which will in its first release be a kind of PEARWeb for the ZZ/OSS Installer Client. Nevertheless, the ZIS does not rely on PEARWeb, it is based on CONESYS, the COntent NEtwork SYStem. In this respect, the second major release of the ZIS will allow for automatic and granular distribution of package, application, and distribution data accross servers.

By the way: Christian Stocker will come from Switzerland and also do a presentation on Popoon at the PHPUG meeting.