Professional LAMP: Linux®, Apache, MySQL®, and PHP5 Web Development

Chapter 8. PEAR and PECL

The underlying concept of open source is, of course, using a collaborative effort to accomplish great things. The synergy that exists between the countless contributors and their efforts pushes open source projects through ever-expanding boundaries. However, with this immense and vastly diverse effort come challenges that could potentially hinder the success of the movement. These challenges are organization, coordination, and direction. Without organization, there would be no standards in code writing, or a systematic approach to putting together a package. Without coordination, snippets of code would be dispersed throughout the vast Internet, most likely lost between poorly written HTML pages, never to be seen by human eyes. Without direction, there would be no look to the future, no resource for aspiring contributors to get excited about. In short, there would just be a bunch of techies writing and rewriting the same snippets of code as everybody else, all acting independently in their own little proverbial computing bubbles. Everyone knows that no man is an island, however, and that's where the PEAR and PECL groups come in, to provide desperately needed organization, coordination, and direction, so developers can all be better coders in the long run.

By providing developers with ready-made scripts that accomplish common tasks, such as connecting to a database or interfacing with an XML document, PEAR and PECL packages can save you a lot of coding time ...