NYCPHP Meetup

[Dan Cech]

Cliff,

Firstly let me get one 'pet peeve' off my chest.  When creating a new 
topic please create a new email rather than replying to a list message 
with a different subject line.  For those of us using email clients with 
threading support this gets really annoying.

As for PEAR packages, I use DB on a daily basis at work and would not be 
without it (or adodb if that's your preference) for any major project.

I have also had great success with Mail_Mime for parsing incoming email 
messages, Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer and XML_RPC.

You do sometimes have to get used to doing things 'the PEAR way', but 
the wealth of pre-developed and tested software is something that is 
very hard to ignore.
Dan

Cliff Hirsch wrote:
> Every time I look at PEAR packages, I think, "wow that sure would have
> saved me some time." Then, when I dig deeper, I see that the package is
> in alpha, or it has no documentation, or the learning curve doesn't
> appear to be worth the effort, or I worry about customization and
> extensibility to my specific requirements (such as how committed do I
> get before I hit the wall with the package) or I worry if the general
> purpose nature of these packages will cause them to be slow.
> 
> The latest packages I have looked at that have caused this angst are
> Structures_DataGrid, HTML_Table, Pager 2.2 and Validate. Although these
> same general thoughts appear with many other packages such as the mighty
> HTML Quickform.
> 
> What packages are your favorites? Would you use them for full blown,
> large scale custom web applications or smaller "corporate-style"
> development effort? Any thoughts or experience with extensibility,
> rendering and performance?
> 
> Cliff Hirsch