Re: New Zend Framework

Hi, Ian Warner wrote:

Sorry I didn't think my mail warranted such a patronising response as that, I have only joined this newsletter recently and will help out others where I can, and have done already. All I was asking was some simple questions on whether this is the best place to get help, as you state it is then fine! Also what are the plans for PEAR, I see a lot of competition looming up as you state also, and want to know that PEAR is planning for this as a community.

In case the tone of my message somewhat masked the actual content of it, I'll repeat. You are comparing corporate projects (Zend Framework, ez Components, etc) with a community project (PEAR). These guys have marketing budgets, PEAR does not, you can't really do anything about that. These guys have money to pay web-designers for a pretty-looking site, PEAR does not. Therefore competition for "being *more* attractive to new PHP developers" is a battle that can't be won (unless you bring in some corporate backing as well) and trying to fight in it is wasting resources. PEAR has enough visibility to attract new users and developers already. As for the plans, I, being a part of PEAR community, am planning not to bother and concentrate on writing HTML_QuickForm2 instead.

Why not use MediaWiki to start with - Free and PHPBB - Free - yes i can host them if needs be!

Well, the source code for PEAR website is in CVS, directory pearweb. You can setup a copy of the website somewhere and try to integrate MediaWiki and phpBB with it. At the very least they should use the same auth credentials as the PEAR website itself. Now, of course, there is a question whether these things will be used. 'Cause I don't see any benefits of the forum over the mailing list except for the ability to have cool Futurama avatars. Wiki *is* useful, but packages that really need wiki tend to have one installed offsite.

I didn't make any mistakes - I stated that I wanted to help out but if sarcasm is all I will get on this list then I am already reconsidering.

My experience with PEAR and other Open Source projects tells me that there are two kinds of people: 1) Those who claim they want to help; 2) Those who do actually help. This second kind also can take a far stronger beating than one sarcastic response before they reconsider.

Is this newsgroup / list the best place to ask for help - or are the better resources? I note that on the Zend forums there was a lot of activity, and also they have a pretty good wiki with help docs on the various packages, does Pear have an official forum?

Yes it is the best place. But please note that unlike Zend Framework there are no people *paid* to answer your questions here. The wiki they use is a commercial product by the way (it is also written in Java rather than in enterprise-ready Zend-enabled buzzword-driven PHP). Would you sponsor a license for its installation on PEAR website? Would you sponsor a Vbulletin license either?

We have moved a big project over to using PEAR packages and I would like to know that PEAR has a plan for the future, it seems that there is no visible documentation that states where PEAR will evolve too.

Yes, there is an official plan: PEAR will die a slow and painful death in the upcoming 2 months. Now, are you feeling more confident?

Will PEAR move onto subversion?

What for? It isn't mandatory to keep package source in PEAR CVS anyway, people needing SVN may keep their packages outside.

Will it get a wiki, forum?

As soon as you sponsor 'em.

I would like to help out as much as possible as it is in my interest now also, so let me know, the main thing that worries me is that PEAR is not attractive to new PHP developers, similar to English football if you don't nurture the grass roots then you will end up losing the battle in the quarters!

You made a standard mistake of confusing the corporate software distributed under open source license with a community-driven project. A community driven project does not have * Paid people to support infrastructure / money to buy needed software or hardware; it relies on donations and volunteer work. * Marketing people, money to bribe "independent" "objective" journalists. Now, if you look for example at MySQL's website (corporate software under Open Source license) it looks way cooler than PostgreSQL's (community project). Unfortunately, the product this cool website supports is still inadequate compared to PostgreSQL. Also there are dozens of MySQL cheerleaders all over the internet due to their brilliant (although quite FUDdy) marketing. I can predict that we'll soon see dozens of Zend Framework cheerleaders as well.