Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL, 2nd Edition

Core Components

PEAR's core components are general-purpose, reliable packages that work with most web servers, database servers, browsers, and operating systems. If you're using PHP 4.3 or later on a Unix system, the PEAR core components and the PEAR installer for adding other packages are already installed and ready for use. For Microsoft Windows, the integration occurred in PHP 4.3.2.

The list of core components can change but at the time of writing it includes:

PEAR base and error handling classes

These are the foundations of other PEAR packages, and you don't need a detailed understanding of them unless you plan to develop your own package. We discuss error handling in our introduction to PEAR DB in the next section.

PEAR Console command-line parsing

Used for non-web scripts.

PEAR DB

Database server abstraction. Discussed in detail in the next section.

HTTP methods

Used to format HTTP-compliant dates, negotiate language, and compress data for fast transfer.

PEAR Mail

Used for mail sending, including platform independence, MIME attachments, and correct email address validation.

PEAR System

Platform-independent commands for making and removing directories and files, concatenating files, and finding the full path of a program.

What's Installed?

Now, let's check the core components distributed with your PHP installation.

Unix systems—PHP 4.3.0 and later

For the instructions in this section to work, you must have followed our installation instructions in Appendix A to Appendix C. You also need an ...