Using PEAR

PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, is PHP’s answer to Perl’s CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). What PEAR does is put common libraries of code into one location, allowing developers to achieve complex functionality without advanced PHP scripting. The official Web site for PEAR is http://pear.php.net (Figure 10.12).

Figure 10.12. The home page for PEAR.

Many things I have (or will) do in this book could be done using PEAR modules, including

  • Interacting with MySQL

  • Page caching

  • Sending email

  • HTTP authentication

Each PEAR package (or class) contains descriptions of what that package does. They frequently also give ...

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