Re: CALL FOR NOMINATIONS: elections for PEAR Group

Le 21 mars 07 à 21:47, Gregory Beaver a écrit :

If you would like to run for a seat, please send a message to pear-dev@lists.php.net in reply to this message with your name and user account at pear.php.net (for instance, I am Greg Beaver, my user account is http://pear.php.net/user/cellog)

I'd like to propose myself to be part of the PEAR Group. My name is Bertrand Mansion, I live in Paris, France. I am 33 years old, father of a 2 years old girl. I run my own company, Mamasam, which is a small company but we have interesting projects for big and small clients. I know PHP well as I have been working with it since 1999. I think I love this language. I also learned C, Objective-C (and the Apple frameworks), Python, Ruby (and RoR), Javascript, Actionscript, Flash, Lua (since I am also a Wow player...). I use PHP5 daily, along with XHTML and jQuery (I have been using Prototype and YUI, but I like jQuery better today). I use Drupal in a lot of client projects today. I run the Cocoa mailing list archive, www.cocoabuilder.com I have been involved in PEAR since 2001 when I first contributed the HTML_Table package. This was my first real contribution to open-source and since then, I am a strong believer in this cause. I took part to the PHPLib project beforehand, but did not contribute much since my skills back then didn't really allow me to. I have next contributed HTML_QuickForm, Console_GetArgs, Config, Event_Dispatcher, Net_URL_Mapper and provided code and patches for other PEAR projects. My next big projects for PEAR are HTML_QuickForm2 and a lightweight database mapper. But since I am very busy at work, I don't have much time to put into those at the moment. I have taken part to 2 pear gathering in Amsterdam where I met Lukas, Arnaud, Markus, Tobias, George and others (some retired since). My vision of PEAR is that such a project has a role to play in today's evolution of PHP. Today's trend is towards frameworks. This is a move that was introduced in our world by Ruby on Rails. I am not a framework guy. I remember an article by Joel Spolsky <http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431.12> and I pretty much aggree with it. I am also in line with what Alan Knowles wrote two years ago about ZF and Pear <http://www.akbkhome.com/blog.php/View/108/Frameworks_Frameworks_more_than_you_ever_wanted.html>. I prefer a nice set of reliable packages I can use as a toolset for my own "frameworks". I tend to rewrite the framework on a per-project basis. It's not what takes the longest when you have the toolset. I don't know of a framework which fits it all, so you either endup with hacks (which is something Ruby makes easy to write, with its closures and other tricks) but these hacks make your code quickly unmaintainable, or with a dead-end ("sorry, I can't implement this feature with this framework"). There is not one way to write a web application, and therefore, there can't be one framework. This is where PEAR comes into play. With PEAR packages, you can quickly write an unlimited number of frameworks, designed specifically for your project. All you have to do is write the glue code. And if you are clever enough, you make your glue code reusable for other similar projects. If a PEAR package doesn't exactly fit your needs, PEAR provides the infrastructure to provide patches and to discuss new features. I would say that PEAR, thanks to PHP5 adoption, is now providing much better quality packages. Documentation is still way behind though. I always thought that writing documentation for PEAR is boring and confusing and complex. I would like to change this if I am elected for PEAR group and try to provide a better documentation system. This would be my project for the year to come. Thanks for reading me :) -- Bertrand Mansion Mamasam Work : http://www.mamasam.com Blog : http://golgote.freeflux.net