The PEAR project was started by Stig S. Bakken to create a tool similar to that of Perl's CPAN archive. Its primary goal is to become a repository for PHP extensions and library code. The most ambitious goal of the project is to try to define standards that can help developers write portable and re-usable code.
Documentation about the project is starting to appear on the Internet, surely a consequence of its growing popularity. Some initial documentation can already be found in the official PHP manual and more will be added.
While PEAR is still pretty much a work in progress, the PEAR installer and the PEAR site for instance, will probably grow a lot in the coming months. There is a lot of talk on the main PHP Core Developer mailing list of using PEAR in the upcoming releases to host the growing number of C extensions and also to use the PEAR installer as a front-end tool for users to download and install extensions into PHP.
All of this without mentioning PEAR's PHP library code, which is often regarded as one of the most clean and well-designed libraries available today for PHP. One of its most popular packages is PEAR::DB, the database abstraction library created by this project. Bakken is even working on porting the main classes and functions to a C extension, so the package can be as fast as possible.
Give this a try and let us know how it compares to Perl's CPAN.
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This new project will surely become one of the most important aspects of PHP in the future, allowing developers to share code using the PEAR site and giving users the ability to download and install extensions and libraries of PHP code.
How can I begin using PEAR?
As previously mentioned, PEAR is continuing to evolve and improve. However, a number of packages are currently in use now. The most popular one is PEAR::DB, which allows the developer to write code that could be used for several different database servers. For example, a developer could write one script that would insert an entry on a table and it would work for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle.