What is PEAR ?

[Anon]

Can some explain to a nOOb what PEAR is ?

[toma42]

PEAR is a collection of scripts which, it is hoped, will provide the same kind of resource that CPAN does for perl...that is, pre-written scripts to do many common tasks.

cvs.php.net and pear.php.net are useful as well as php.net/pear for tutorials (see the comments)

[Anon]

Thanks tom.. just bringing my self up to a crawl with PHP.. Trying assist our development team migrate from Microslop to Open source..

[bfinucan]

Hello,
Expanding on the previous reply:

Along with being a central repository of shared, portable code, the PEAR project lays down ground rules for how to format your code, proper syntax, methods of commenting and more. It is a great resource for new coders to learn proper formatting and syntax rules.

Coming from an ASP background, I wrote VBScript styled code when I first got into PHP. I thought it was great that I could still use the familiar If...End If type of syntax. Sinful, simply sinful.

While many people are indifferent to code formatting, or hold it up as a sacred form of personal expression, following an accepted set of rules will help everyone.

[Anon]

PEAR DB is a nice abstraction layer and works well, though a little slower than ADOdb (http://php.weblogs.com/ADOdb/ ). I still prefer the PEAR DB and am using it with PHP/MSSQL in a production environment though it is limited traffic call center ticketing software. I'd probably use ADOdb (or native if portablility isn't needed, and mssql sql syntax tends to preclude that anyway) for high traffic.

There is a little documentation and even a couple of tutorials for PEAR and PEAR DB at

http://php.weblogs.com/php_pear_tutorials