Re: The Nature of PEAR's Greatness

Paul M Jones wrote:

PEAR-CORE members (whoever they are) are specifically encouraged to wait 48 hours before commenting, please. This might be dumb, and it is not to limit their input, but the purpose here is to see what the *customers* of PEAR like about it, not what PEAR-CORE *thinks* their customers like about it.

Okay, so what Do I like about PEAR? I like... - The idea of having a standard library of ready-to-use components practically built into the PHP release. - Common coding standards - Common error handling - Relatively good documentation (although still lacking here and there, but mostly still better than many other non-pear components) - Great support from the community - not only for the end user, but also for developers PEAR has given me a lot. I first got into PEAR when I looked into a nicer way for accessing databases back in 2000 (I think) and soon discovered the joy of using OOP components. Even my most stupid questions were well-answered on the PEAR mailing list :-) Since those days as a pure user, I have contributed two packages to PEAR myself. It was a little hard to get the first one in, but the package, LiveUser, has benefitted greatly from all the valuable input I got from the list. The second package, FormBuilder, was easier to get in, but still I received a number of suggestions to make it better before I got my +5 votes. If your package is not accepted at first, and some people have valid suggestions for improvement, people shouldn't see this just as criticism but as an opportunity to make things better. In my case, I even had to rewrite parts of my applications that were already using my components to match the changes I did because of input from PEAR-DEV. But in the end, it all paid of, everytime. My classes would never have become as good as they are now if it hadn't been for the input from this list, and all the contributions I got from other developers. And I have learned a lot from all you guys here, working together with the community here on this list has effectively made me a better developer. Through using and developing for PEAR I have learned about OOP, version control, working in distributed teams, etc. pp. I think all this goes a bit beyond the initial question, so what I'm trying to say is I wanna give PEAR a big virtual hug and say "THANK YOU" to everyone here on this list! CU Markus P.S.: Of course PEAR also has its negative sides from time to time,

      but hey, you said we should say only positive things in this
      thread ;-)