PHP archive

Not so long ago, it was proposed that we should have an PHP archive model like Java does. I think it might me useful for application deployment. Someone posted that PEAR::Config has this feature. I could find such feature. What was proposed is something like this: File: application.php <? include_once ("classes/MyClass.inc.php"); $f = fopen("files/test.txt", "r"); ... ?> The archive my_application.par (could be an .zip, etc) would have these three files inside: application.php classes/MyClass.inc.php files/test.txt And this standalone application is executed with: php -p <package-file> <startup-script> php -p my_application.par application.php Since PHP already have an ZIP file extension and now the filesystem functions have an improved abstraction layer, maybe it's time to think about adding transparent ZIP support on this abstraction layer. Cristiano Duarte.