PEAR: An Introduction

Joshua Eichorn

PEAR Group

What is PEAR?

• A library of high quality Open Source PHP Code
• A vibrant community of users and developers
• Over 400 packages
• Over 28 Million Downloads

The History of PEAR

• The PEAR project was founded in 1999 by Stig S. Bakken
• Installed by default with PHP in 2000
• Channels added in 2005
• Constitution added in 2007

Why Choose PEAR?

• You don't have to write the code yourself
• Commercial friendly OSS licenses
• A community of developers to rely on, instead of a single person
• Classes for common tasks that can be used without pulling in an entire framework

The PEAR Promise

• Backwards compatibility
• Forever Open Source
• The structure and tools required to maintain a successful Open Source project

Getting the Package Manager

• Linux - chances are its already packaged by your distro
• Windows - run go-pear.bat
• Download go-pear (http://go-pear.org) and run it with PHP
• Use PEAR Remote_Installer to install over ftp/sftp
• go-pear from a browser
• PEAR_Frontend_Web

Installing packages

Instructions at: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php

• pear install packagename
• pear upgrade packagename
• pear upgrade-all
• pear install packagename-beta

If you want to ... use ...

• ... document your code using inline comments use phpDocumentor
• ... support older versions of PHP use PHP_Compat
• ... make your app faster use Cache_Lite
• ... send an email use Mail
• ... support lots of databases use MDB2
• ... create a form with validation use HTML_Quickform
• ... build a C PHP extension use CodeGen_PECL

Getting Help as a PEAR user

• The Support section of the website
• Check the examples dir that got installed with the package
• Check the manual
• API docs from the packages PEAR page
• The PEAR General Mailing List
• #pear on efnet

How you can get involved

• Report Bugs
• Write Documentation
• Run Tests
• Show developers some love by dropping them a kind word or buying something off their wishlist
• Use it

Becoming a Developer

• Help out an existing Package
• Write and propose a new Package
• Join the developer mailing lists
• If your writing a new Package ask for a mentor

PEAR's Plans for the Future

• New Classes taking advantage of PHP5 features
• Greater community responsiveness
• More documentation

Important URLs

• http://pear.php.net
• http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.shared.php
• http://go-pear.org/
• http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.cli.php