On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 15:21:36 -0400, Will Merrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I don't mean to start a flame war here, but I have been working in PHP for a > while now and am about to start a more extensive aplication. Some of the > PEAR modules look good and I just wanted to hear what the collected wisdom > out here thinks about it. > > When I try to read the installation instructions my eyes glaze over and roll > up into my head. Before I fight my way through this learning curve I want to > know if its worth it? Is this the wave of the future or just a flash in the > pan?
PEAR is a repository of lots and lots of useful code. Not only that, it's *quality* code. All packages have to pass the standards to get in and package maintainers are expected to keep their packages up to the standards. The newly appointed PEAR QA group also watches for problems and imforms authors about them, or can even take action if an author doesn't respond. The basics of using PEAR are very simple. If you have PHP installed, you should also have pear. Try typing pear upgrade-all at your command-prompt. If it doesn't work, you either don't have it or your paths need to be fixed. If you don't have it, it's as easy as: $ lynx -source http://go-pear.org/ | php Then you can pear install any package on the site. Some may argue that PEAR imposes too much restraint on coding standards and requires use of the PEAR and PEAR_Error classes. The coding standards are there to promote interoperability and easy readability across all PEAR packages so that you don't have to re-learn how to do look at all of the code. PEAR and PEAR_Error are, according to everyone else, are going to be pared ;-) down for PHP5, leaving a very minimal amount of extra code for extra flexibility and such. For the moment, PEAR and PEAR_Error remain, but IMHO they are very useful. For more discussion (read holy wars) look at the PEAR and PHP list archives. -- paperCrane --Justin Patrin-- -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
