Web Database Applications With Php And Mysql (2nd Edition) [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

7.1 Overview

PEAR is a web-based repository for
common application components and PHP extensions. Version 1.0 was
released as an integrated part of PHP 4.3.0 for Unix systems, and in
PHP 4.3.2 for Microsoft Windows. The current release of PEAR includes
packages for:

Working with HTML and HTTP

Manipulating and validating user data

Sending, receiving, and processing email

Credit card payment processing

Using web services including SOAP

Encryption

Reading and writing files including compressed archives

Graphing and image processing

Using XML

Each package is a separate product, with its own development team,
but each uses PEAR foundation classes and almost all adhere to the
PEAR coding standards. Similarly to PHP, the complete source code of
the packages is available, and it's often useful as
a supplement to the sparse and sometimes dated online documentation.

The
package installation process is easy: packages are installed by
typing a command at the shell prompt in Unix-style systems or by
running a batch utility in Microsoft Windows. This is possible
because all packages are registered and stored in the central
http://pear.php.net repository
that also provides account and version management to the developers.
In addition, the packages are arranged so that if they depend on each
other, you'll be alerted if you're
missing a package during the installation process. We discuss
installation in Section 7.3.3.

Our focus in this chapter is describing how you can install and use
packages, and how to work with the Integrated
Templates and PEAR DB packages. We
also briefly discuss other packages, and some are discussed further
in Chapter 9 where we discuss data validation.

PEAR has other components that we don't discuss in
detail here:

A PHP coding standard primarily for the developers of packages.

PECL
(pronounced pickle), a repository of C
programming language extensions that have traditionally been
distributed with PHP.

Gtk packages
for use with the PHP-GTK project that
provides tools for developing window-based applications. See
http://gtk.php.net.