About PEAR...

edziffel

Have been looking at librarys as am required to do some things which have definately been done many many times before. One was getting a log in page set up. So you do some homework and try to find what is available, and get your theory straight.

Long story short:

1. Not getting why all the libraries I found need to be installed. Wouldn't it be way simpler to just copy out a function(s) and go from there? Is it wrong to think that these are needlessly over complicated.
2. Specific to PEAR, that development seems to be struggeling. While fully appriciating the enormous commitment it takes to do something like that, do others think it leans to the user hostile side with respect to being able to figure out what specific code does?

In the mean time have just coded my own encrypted login in. Took a lot less time than trying to figure out the what, where and how of trying ot utilize a library. Have used Jquery and no way could would this be true for someting like a date picker.

Maybe the issue is the scope of the requrement, but can't help getting the feeling that I'm missing something. Where am I going wrong?

sneakyimp

While the idea of a login function itself sounds pretty simple (and at it's core it sort of is simple), the idea that one simple function will work for everyone just doesn't reflect reality. Different code projects have different needs and there are many parameters related to managing a user login that can be different for different people: the domain where you store your cookies, the name of your cookie values, the cookie expiration dates, how you deal with session id's, how you deal with sessions, etc, etc.

PEAR does tend to seem kind of hostile sometimes but there is some good code in there -- I use their mail classes. The reason PEAR requires so many things to be installed for one simple function is because PEAR classes sometimes make use of other PEAR classes. For instance, the PEAR::Mail class might make use of the PEAR::Mime class or the PEAR::Socket class or whatever. If PEAR did not do this , it would be exponentially more difficult to write it and to maintain it.