The Nature of PEAR's Greatness

This is from a thread on the things that make PEAR "great" according to the developers.

• The installer and packaging mechanism, and the ability to use it for non-PEAR projects
  • Paul Jones, Stephan Schmidt, Clay Loveless, Hans Lellelid, Arthur Hundiak@, Klaus Guenther, Sérgio Carvalho, Richard York, David Costa, Christian Wenz, Firman Wandayandi
• Coding standards rock! (if for no other reason than there is a standard to adhere to)
  • Paul Jones, Clay Loveless, Hans Lellelid, Arthur Hundiak@, Markus Wolff, Sérgio Carvalho, Richard York, David Costa, Christian Wenz, Firman Wandayandi
• Naming conventions rock!
  • Paul Jones, Arthur Hundiak@, Richard York, David Costa, Firman Wandayandi
• A common error handling scheme.
  • Paul Jones, Clay Loveless, Hans Lellelid, Joshua Eichorn, Justin Patrin, Markus Wolff, David Costa, Firman Wandayandi
• The categorization of classes, while it might use some work, is very helpful.
  • Paul Jones, Clay Loveless, Arthur Hundiak@, Richard York, David Costa, Ignatius Reilly, Firman Wandayandi
• The structure of classes (tests/, docs/, etc) is very useful
  • Paul Jones, Clay Loveless, Arthur Hundiak@, David Costa
• The peer review and commentary on code (not necessarily the proposal and voting process, but the ongoing back-and-forth of good-practices discussion)
  • Paul Jones, Stephan Schmidt, Hans Lellelid, Arthur Hundiak@, Joshua Eichorn, Klaus Guenther, Sérgio Carvalho, Richard York, Firman Wandayandi
• It is a standard in fact if not in name
  • Clay Loveless
• Strong focus on backwards compatibility
  • Joshua Eichorn
• High level of package and code quality (vice HotScripts or PhpClasses), focus on OO
  • Justin Patrin, Klaus Guenther, Joshua Eichorn, Sérgio Carvalho, Ignatius Reilly, Firman Wandayandi
• Bug reporting system
  • Justin Patrin
• Barrier for code entry, weed out poor submissions
  • Klaus Guenther, Sérgio Carvalho, Joshua Eichorn
• Part of the PHP release
  • Markus Wolff
• Sense of community
  • Markus Wolff, Paul Jones
• PEAR Group regulation
  • Christian Wenz
• PEAR web site
  • Christian Wenz
• Good documentation, documentation how-to is better than CPAN
  • Markus Wolff@, Christian Wenz, Ignatius Reilly
• Quickform + Controller
  • Ignatius Reilly
• One package per function (mostly)
  • Ignatius Reilly

NOTES:
@ Sort of.

Thu, 15 Apr 2004, 11:01