Till Klampaeckel has a recent post about PEAR versus PEAR Farm on his blog detailing what each is and how to use the PEAR Farm to get your software out there.

With the release of Pirum, I'm really excited to see two public PEAR channels that aim to make PEAR a standard to deploy and manage your applications and libraries. One is PEARhub and the other is PEAR Farm. I think I'm gonna stick with PEAR Farm for a while, so this blog entry focuses on things I noticed when I first played with it. [...] A lot of people mistake these new channels for the wrong thing. They think that this will eventually replace PEAR. I don't think it will - ever.

He shows how to get the PEAR Farm libraries installed (via the PEAR installer) and how to set up your project with the pearfarm command-line tool. He also offers a few "gotchas" and tips to help you with a few of the issues he saw along the way. You can get an idea of the end result by looking at Till's PEAR Farm page.

Rob Morgan has submtted a recent post from his blog that shows how to create and deploy a PEAR package for your application onto the new Pearhub repository.

You might be wondering what is Pearhub? From Pearhub.org - 'Pearhub is a pear channel and a pear package publishing platform. As a user, you can install packages. As a developer, you can publish packages'. You can read Troels Knak-Nielsen's introductory blog post here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/01/08/introducing-pearhub.

You'll need an OpenID, an account on github and know how to use git on your system to get everything packaged up and ready to go. You create your app locally, make a github repository for it and set up a pearhub account to point to it. With all of that set up, it's as easy as doing a channel-discover on the pearhub server and running the "pear install" on the package. The rest is done for you!

In a recent post to his blog Benjamin Eberlei looks at how PEAR and PHAR can affect the lifecycle of the development of your application following some of the feedback he got from a previous article on the same topic. In this revised version he talks about the open source project he's started, Pearanha, to bundle all of these ideas together.

First of all, yes the presented solution was somewhat complex, partly because it is still a proposed idea and definitely up for optimizations. However I am still very convinced of my approach, something I should discuss in more detail.

He mentions some of the downfalls that PHP applications have had up until now as far as ease of deployment and the maintaining of dependencies. Most of the suggested solutions aren't optimal, so a system using the PEAR installer would have to overcome some of them and keep it simple to use. Benjamin has taken the PEAR installer and laid his new Pearanha tool on top of it to help you create custom PEAR installer scripts.

In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog Troels Knak-Nielsen looking at a new PHP-centric service for creating a resource like the Ruby on Rails "gems" but for PHP software - pearhub.org.

I think services like these are an important reason why gems are so popular amongst Ruby developers, and I figured that PHP really needs something similar. So over the Christmas, I have been brewing on a service, which is now stable enough that I'll make it available to the community at large. pearhub.org provides a place where you can register a project, that is hosted on Github, Google code or similar (Currently only git and subversion is supported). The service will generate a PEAR package and put it on a PEAR channel.

PEAR channels have been difficult to set up in the past but the pearhub.org service makes it simple and you get the added benefit of being able to use the PEAR installer application to do installations and upgrades. You can find out more about the service on their FAQ.

Hannes Magnusson has a new post today about an interesting feature of the PHP documentation some might not have known existed - manual pages (man) for PHP functions/methods for unix systems.

For a while I had vim configured to run reflection when I hit "K", but after the PHP documentation team released unix manual pages for PHP I now get the manual page in all its glory; function description, parameter descriptions, return values, examples, notes, see also and everything you are used to see from the online manual. Its awesome.

These manual pages aren't installed by default, so you'll have to grab the download from the PEAR channel for the PHP documentation (doc.php.net/pman). If you're wanting to use it in VIM, you'll also need to change the keywordprg setting to "pman".

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the second part of their look at pagination with the combination of the Zend Framework, Doctrine and PEAR and how the Zend_Paginator component compares to the PEAR and Doctrine alternatives.

In the previous segment of this article, I introduced you to the Zend_Paginator class, which provides a flexible API for paginating any data collection, whether it is expressed as an array or a database result set. [...] This article will explore two such alternatives, the PEAR Pager class and the Doctrine Pager class, and give you a crash course in how you can use them to quickly add paging and sorting features to your PHP application.

The article gives examples for both of the other methods - a simple pagination of database information with the PEAR pager component (and other packages that can make the results more effective) and the creation of a Doctrine instance where the results are handled via a series of built-in method calls.

Benjamin Eberlei has a new post today about a deployment technique he's trying out - using PEAR and PHAR to create deployable packages.

With PHP 5.3 the PHAR extension is a pretty powerful concept for all your deployment needs, however it does not tell the complete story. [...] With Pirum being a simple PEAR channel server there is also momentum for projects to distribute their code via PEAR. However PEAR is mostly used in the server-wide configuration use-case, which is not very useful if you plan to distribute your complete application in one PHAR file.

He shows how to create a sample package from a Zend Framework application, set it up in a PEAR channel complete with the ability to run a "pear upgrade" to get the latest version of the package. He also includes a bit of sample code to work with the PHAR archive and load the libraries inside.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial that walks you through the process of creating a simple MVC framework in PHP based on Smarty, PostgreSQL and the PEAR XML_Serializer package.

PHP now enables you to build robust, manageable, and beautiful enterprise web applications. The best way to do that is to divide the application into three components: model, view, and controller. In other words, you need to separate the presentation, the database, and the business logic from each other. The most common approach for achieving this design goal is to adhere to a strict Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework.

He uses the example of creating an application (a feed reader) to show how the parts of the MVC will fit together as a whole. You won't find any code examples in the article, just an explanation of how everything works together. You can, however, dowload the source and follow along.

In response to a different post he read on a postal/zip code validation topic, Ken Guest has points out other resources that can be used to accomplish the same sort of thing and already exist.

I drew attention to two things. The first is that there are Validation packages in PEAR, including the main Validate class and all the Validate_xx subclasses such as Validate_US, Validate_CA and some 22 others). The second item I drew Jamie's attention to is that his validation code counts a zip code of "00000' as valid, when the USPS zip code look up tool correctly (and they should know!) identifies that code as invalid.

He wholeheartedly opposes the "Not Invented Here" syndrome that developers (with a hefty dose of framework developers included) seem to have.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's the first part of a series looking at pagination and sorting of data with the combination of the Zend Framework, Doctrine and PEAR.

When building database-backed applications, one of the important problems for a developer or user interface engineer involves making large data sets more manageable by, and therefore more useful to, application users. [...] Back in the good old days, adding pagination to a PHP application was mostly a manual task, involving offset calculations and custom query generation. In recent years, the task has become significantly simpler, mostly due to the presence of ready-made pagination components in most common frameworks.

His tutorial uses the Zend Framework, Doctrine and the Pager, MDB2 and Structures_Datagrid PEAR packages. He starts with a basic select and format kind of example to show a few lines per page. To improve it (for larger data sets) he shows how to use the Zend_Paginator to only grab the rows needed for the page. Finally, he adds in code to allow for column sorting, making it easy to reorganize the results how you'd like.