Posted by Richard Levasseur on 07/28/06 16:00

DonO wrote:
> If you're working in PHP 4.x PEAR is a separate piece of the puzzle,
> and is basically just a bunch of code written in an Object Oriented
> fashion. There's also PECL ("pickle") that re-creates much of the PEAR
> objects in C, so they're compiled and run faster.
>
> PEAR is built into PHP 5 from what I understand (just starting to work
> in it now) so it's not "necessary" but it's available if you want to
> use it for things like emailing, database connection (PDO), performance
> monitoring, etc.
>
> I didn't come from an OO background when I started with PHP, so I
> didn't mess with PEAR or much of the OO model in 4. Since I've heard
> good things about 5's implementation, I'm trying to wrap my brain
> around it now.
>
> HTH.
> D.
>

It should be noted almost none of PEAR is written in PHP5. This means
that it doesn't take advantage of any of the really new and nifty
object constructs. The advantage is it is backwards compatible with
almost any PHP version.

PEAR is not built into PHP. I believe a few packages are included in
the default download, but most aren't. The pear installer does come
with php, though, and you can use that to download andinstall any of
the pear packages. If possible, I suggest using PECL, since the speed
and quality is generally much better (the downside is there aren't as
many packages that aren't beta or alpha).

BTW - please don't top post

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