Re: The Nature of PEAR's Greatness

OK. My experience is probably a bit different from that of previous contributors. I am not a geek, but a management consultant turned architect/ developer. Therefore my evaluation of PEAR is fully on the economical, not technological side. I have fully embraced PEAR, for the following reasons: 1. Quickform + Controller In itself largely a sufficient reason to adopt PEAR. Awesome packages. Already saved me tons of money. 2. Excellent categorization. I hope the "Finance" category will soon be created and taken on. There's a lot of money in the financial industry IT, so this would entice people from there to adopting PEAR/ PHP. Packages would include: - Excel-style financial functions (there is a good, albeit incomplete PHPClass to this effect) - option pricing - stock quote web services - currency-related web services - etc. 3. One and only one (well, almost) package per functionality. IMHO absolutely essential. My experience of PHPClasses is that it is long and difficult to evaluate before choosing between the multiplicity of candidate packages. In many cases could take more time to evaluate than to write from scratch. Still I use several excellent PHPClasses packages, some of which could profitably appear in PEAR. 4. Good documentation Here again in contrast to PHPClasses I once had to adapt a PHPClass class documented only in Portuguese (where I'm not exactly fluent), albeit a great class. Pity though that it is not possible to add comments to the doc (à la PHP) 5. Excellent ML archives & support Most notably from AB and BM from QF/ QFC. I'll repay you when I become rich like Fréjus with this new start-up whose web site I am basing entirely on PEAR... And not for the following reasons: 6. Installer, package manager I still install manually after bad experiences (on Windows 2000), but probably I should try again... Just my 2 Belgian francs Keep up the great work Ignatius _________________________ "Paul M Jones" <pmjones@ciaweb.net> wrote in message news:21E2641C-8A4B-11D8-815B-00039351BC90@ciaweb.net... > New thread, based on the comments from the 'natural selection' > discussion. > > 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. > > Positive comments only! If you can't say something nice, don't say > anything. (Yes, this is a moral outrage to some. ;-) > > Tell the list, what do you think is great about PEAR? > > * The installer is great. > > * Coding standards rock! > > * Naming conventions rock! > > * I like the idea of a common error handling scheme. > > * The categorization of classes, while it might use some work, is very > helpful. > > * The structure of classes (tests/, docs/, etc) is very useful > > * The peer review and commentary on code has been helpful to me in > particular (not necessarily the proposal process per se, but the > ongoing back-and-forth of good practice) > > ... I'm sure there's more, let me think about it ... > > > -- > > Paul M. Jones > > Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty. > http://phpsavant.com/