Chapter 15. Making Your Job Easier with PEAR
Once you start creating a few PHP Web applications, you'll find that your scripts often need to do the same tasks again and again. For example, many applications require a login/logout mechanism, and most Web applications display and process HTML forms at some point.
If you've written your applications in a modular way, using classes and functions to break them down into specific chunks of functionality, you should find that you can reuse those classes or functions across applications. For instance, the Member class you developed in Chapters 13 and 14 could easily be used to register, store, and retrieve members for any Web application.
Code reuse is important because it can save you hours of time. However, rather than reusing your own code, why not reuse someone else's? That way, you don't even have to write the code in the first place! This is where PEAR comes in. PEAR stands for the PHP Extension and Application Repository, and it's a big collection of high-quality, open-source code packages that you can freely download and use in your own applications.
When using a PEAR package, make sure that you check its license. Some package licenses let you use the package in practically any way you like; for example, you can include the code in an application that you then sell as a product. Other licenses are more restrictive.
Each package is a separately maintained class, or set of classes, for achieving a specific goal. At the time of writing, ...
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