Re: The Nature of PEAR's Greatness

Ever since I understood and started using PEAR packages (that took a little while ;-) I've loved it. It's a central place to go for high quality PHP packages that all conform to a standard. Documentation is usually good but lacking that the in-code documentation is almost always good enough to learn a package. A standard error mechanism simply can't be stressed enough. Whenever I use a PEAR package I know how my errors will come back to me and in what format. I don't have to worry about where to find an error message, it's always in the same place. This also makes integrating multiple packages or building on top of another PEAR package very simple. Errors can be just passed right through or very slightly modified. The code quality has been good in every package I've seen. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but I can post a bug and e-mail the maintainer about it. Nearly all of my bugs have been responded to fairly quickly. (Speaking of which, I hope my many HTTP_Request and HTTP_Client bugs of the last few days have been seen ;-) The design concepts behind packages have helped me learn new ways to do things. Factory methods, listeners, etc... I have been made a better coder by checking out the PEAR packages and trying to emulate them in my own projects. I recently wrote a web cart system based on various PEAR packages and Smarty and they made my job quite a bit easier. If you want to see it: http://www.pnicorp.com/pniCart. That's all I can think of for now. Thanks for starting a positive thread. :-) -- paperCrane <Justin Patrin>