I've been exploring the capabilities of phing lately, and I've run into some limitations, and I think the query handler in nexista could really work well with phing. Over the weekend I'm planning to explore how the two can work together. Should be interesting! This is a natural follow-up on my thoughts that the sitemap spec should be more compatible with Apache's Cocoon project, as phing is a php port of Apache's Ant project. Similar to how nodows uses phing to build complex systems, I'm feeling that it doesn't make any worthwhile sense to use phing in the runtime processes of nexista applications. However, I am feeling confident that it would be extremely useful in building those applications, very similar to how I'm already using symfony's command line tool to initialize projects and applications. I'll have to come up with some build.xml and build.properties files, as well as a consistent format for storing and distributing nexista apps like auth and user. Phing might be the right type of tool to slightly adjust the settings for each file, depending upon what the target is. For example, a build.properties file could contain the specs for building pbooks from scratch, rather than using the packaged distribution. By using phing to build it for you, it would download each required component, and then set information like database credentials, cache settings, and what not. Thanks to phing's new pdo capabilities, it would be very useful for initializing databases too.