I’ve released a new version of the PEAR Net_DNS2 library- you can install it now through the command line PEAR installer:

pear install Net_DNS2

Or download it directly from the Google Code page here.

This release includes a significant speed-up with the local cache by using JSON to encode the cache data, rather then the PHP serialize function. Using JSON loses the class information of the objects, but the data remains the same, and the serialization time is about half.

A Query lookup against Google DNS- NO cache

time: 0.0340800285339

        Net_DNS2_RR_A Object
        (
            [address] => 199.59.148.82
            [name] => twitter.com
            [type] => A
            [class] => IN
            [ttl] => 28
            [rdlength] => 4
            [rdata] => 
        )

with cache + serialize

time: 0.00258994102478

        Net_DNS2_RR_A Object
        (
            [address] => 199.59.148.82
            [name] => twitter.com
            [type] => A
            [class] => IN
            [ttl] => 28
            [rdlength] => 4
            [rdata] => 
        )

with cache + json

time: 0.00178384780884

        stdClass Object
        (
            [address] => 199.59.148.82
            [name] => twitter.com
            [type] => A
            [class] => IN
            [ttl] => 28
            [rdlength] => 4
            [rdata] => 
        )

Version 1.2.0

This version changes the way some exceptions are thrown, and may break your code!

• added numeric error codes to the Lookups class, and had each method that throws an exception throw a numeric error code along with the message.
• dropped all references to InvalidArgumentException; we only use the Net_DNS2_Exception from now on.
• added the CAA, URI, TALINK, CDS and TA resource records. Some of these are experimental, but are pretty straight forward.
• fixed a bug in formatString(); my version was only putting double quotes around strings that have spaces, but apparently ALL strings should have double quotes around them. This is how BIND does it.
• re-organized the Net_DNS2_Lookups initialization code; it no longer creates a global object of itself.
• fixed a bug in the caching code; in some cases it wouldn’t cache the same content more then once.
• added an option to use JSON to serialize the cache data rather than using the PHP serialize function. JSON is much faster, but loses the class definition, and becomes a stdClass object.
• fixed a handful of cases where I was using double quotes (“) where a single quote (‘) would be fine.