[commits] [Wiki] created: Doc/Dev/HordePear

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guest [92.224.22.83]  Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:03:26 +0000

Created page: http://wiki.horde.org/Doc/Dev/HordePear

+Overview

This component delivers a small subset of the functionality required  
to deal with the data structures established by the  
[http://pear.php.net PEAR project]. Currently it allows accessing the  
REST interface of a remote PEAR server and provides utilities to deal  
with package.xml files. The most important functionality concerning  
the packaging manifest is the automatic update of the XML data.

Further details can be found in the accompanying documents  
((Doc/Dev/HordePear/REMOTE_PEAR_SERVER|REMOTE_PEAR_SERVER)) and  
((Doc/Dev/HordePear/PACKAGE_XML|PACKAGE_XML)).

+Rationale for this component

This package reimplements some of the code that is being provided on  
[http://pear.php.net pear.php.net] via various PEAR_* packages.

Of course it should not be necessary to write new code providing PEAR  
functionality given the available PEAR_* packages. Unfortunately none  
of these provide anything near a decent and usable developer API. One  
could hope for the newer [http://pear2.php.net/ Pyrus] code to resolve  
some of the deeper structural problems the PEAR code has. The  
currently available code (as of 2011) does not look like a major  
improvement though.

The decision to reimplement PEAR code has not been taken lightly:  
originally the Horde components helper had been based on the original  
PEAR code. But the amount of hacks and workarounds required to sustain  
that basis was too much for a long term solution. As a consequence  
Horde_Pear was started in order to generate a backend providing the
functionality specifically required by the Horde components helper.