Define "PEAR folks". I don't have an account on pear.php.net, but I use
I'm not the sueing kinda person :-) The packages are not documented yet, not even fully implemented. That's why I wanted them not to be used by anyone for now but still post the source to have you guys tell me if there's a place for it on PEAR or not. I'm just not willing to post a piece of software that's resembling a Swiss cheese - with holes here and holes there.
DB_FORM
Don't know whether it's functionality crosses OOH_Form, though (and I can't tell
because OOH isn't documented, either, and it's code is thoroughly opaque).
I don't know OOH_Form. Where can it be downloaded? It's not really a concurrence to other form packages already on PEAR as it's strictly for editing SQL data, forms are not rendered from previously built form-objects, and built in protection against form and SQL hacks as well as a simple, expandable and very useful syntax check. And it's quite small - not much space for nasty bugs. Furthermore, all functionality is in one single page, so you only have to create one page (or form so to speak) to perform inserts/updates/deletes.
DB_AUTH
Apart from the (presumed) use of database abstraction, what is the benefit
of using this class over inserting a database authentication module into
apache? What is the slowdown observed when using this class, as compared to
an apache auth module?
AFAIK, Apache mods work with HTAuth only, with the little password requester windows. (Or not? If not, what is PEAR Auth good for?) Two uncool things about HTAuth: I don't know any browser that can logout, you have to restart the browser. And an automatic login after signing up without the little password requester window (to my knowledge) can't be done.
DB_LIST
What is it?
It's a SQL table to HTML list renderer. You create a list object from an SQL table and add columns to it. There are properties to tweak the way the content is displayed, you can add action buttons to each row etc. Finally you call the render method and get a HTML table displayed based on the list object you've just created. This HTML table (the list) has built-in core functionalities such as sorting (little arrows in the column header), pageing (like search engines split results on several pages) and search. The idea is to use DB_List to Browse DB content and then link with action buttons to link to a second page with DB_Form to insert/update/delete content. Together with DB_Form you have to create only two simple pages to have a complete frontend for an SQL table.
(It's somewhat inspired by ASP.net, I wanted to create SQL DB frontends at the same pace and flexibility as I could do with ASP.net.)
And - there will be a documentation with examples and all.
Hope this helps to get an idea of what I'm cooking here. Again, my aim to submit this at this quite early stage is to figure out if it's good for PEAR, as I wouldn't implement some useful features that I'm not gonna use myself at this point.
-sven