Version 0.5 of The State Decoded is now available on GitHub. This release is full of general enhancements, and some of them are significant. Twenty-four issues were resolved with this release, including some new features, some significant optimizations, some standardization, and further abstraction of functionality to make it easier to implement.

Here are the most interesting changes:

• All functionality likely to require customization with each implementation now resides in a state-specific file, rather than being mixed in with core functionality.
• The beginnings of a templating system are in place, allowing images, CSS, and HTML to be packaged together, in the general direction of how WordPress works.
• A new method has been added to the Law class, that simply verifies that a given law exists. This has led to a 350% improvement in page rendering times (with the benchmark law, 2,142 milliseconds reduced to 610 milliseconds), a result of the need to verify that every law mentioned in a section actually exists.
• Several files have been renamed, in order to prevent customizations from being overwritten with upgrades. This is an important step towards providing an upgrade path between versions.
• Two bulk download files are automatically generated each time the parser is run—a JSON version of the custom dictionary, and a JSON version of the entire legal code.
• Much has been done towards standardization generally, so that the project adheres to best practices in PHP and MySQL. While this is of little benefit to the end user, for anybody actually getting their hands dirty with code, it should make things much simpler. There’s a lot more to be done to comply with PEAR coding standards, but that’s underway.
• Virginia attorney James Steele created a print stylesheet to format laws nicely when he printed them out. He was kind enough to contribute that to the project, and printouts of laws are now vastly improved.

Most of these changes are, in one way or another, moving the project towards standardization, automation, and normalization, to make it easier to deploy, maintain, and use. It should all be a lot easier to understand for a programmer diving into it for the first time.

The next release is version 0.6, dedicated to API improvements. That will be comprised of a relatively small number of issues, but they’re big ones: creating a RESTful JSON-based API, and supporting a crudely typed XML input format to simplify the process of parsing new codes. The latter is important, because the present arrangement requires that one know enough PHP to modify the parser to suit their own code’s unique storage and formatting. The idea here is that you can, alternately, use the tools of your choice to create an XML version of that code, and as long as that XML is of the style expected by the parser, it can be imported without having to edit a line of PHP in The State Decoded. Note that v0.6 was supposed to be the release in which the Solr search engine was integrated deeply into the software. That has now been pushed back—it’ll probably be v0.9—in order to accommodate a vendor’s schedule.