Pear!

January 15, 2004 • programming • 323 words • about a 1 minute read

Speaking of the Pear libraries. If you’ve never used them, you should! Pear libraries are just about the greatest thing to ever be invented, right behind bacon and computers!

The Pear Repository contains a crapload of PHP Classes that help you do just about anything you can think of! One of the classes that I probably use the most is DB. If you’ve ever dealt with stuff in a DB, you know how crappy it can be if you ever have to switch DB backends. With DB you use standard API calls like query() and connect() along with a host of methods that making receiving data breeze (automatically dumping ALL results of a query into an associative array).

Anyways, there’s a ton more like XML_Parser, XML_RSS (an RSS parser), XML_HTMLSax a SAX baser parser for badly formed XML documents ;)

Some of my other favorites:

File_Find – A class that facilitates the search of filesystems
HTML_QuickForm – Provides methods for creating, validating, and processing HTML forms
HTML_Template_IT – Even though I’m a Smarty enthusiast now, IT is an awesome lightweight templating engine.
Pager and Pager_Sliding are neat easy ways to page data (like search results)
MP3_ID lets you read and write MP3 style ID3 tags

There are a ton more, including a Calendar which is a damn copy of my Calendar class that I made for CERIAS ;) Well not really, but it does the exact same thing I did and didn’t have a release until well after I finished mine:

Calendar provides an API for building Calendar data structures. Using the simple iterator and it’s “query” API, a user interface can easily be built on top of the calendar data structure, at the same time easily connecting it to some kind of underlying data store, where “event” information is being held.

Bastards ;)