What is PHP Pear?

One of the common issues you may face when scripting with PHP language is writing a project that has already been done before. This often leads to a waste of time and resources. PHP Pear seeks to solve this problem for web designers. Most interviewers usually ask their candidates whether they are well-versed on the subject of PHP PEAR. Here are some of the answers you should provide if you meet that question in a web development job interview.

What is PHP Pear?

PEAR is described as a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP elements. The name ?PEAR? is a contraction of the words PHP Extension and Application Repository. The Pear project is governed by a community of PHP developers including the PEAR Group, Collectives and a President.

The developers of PHP began working on PEAR in November 1999. PEAR:: DB was the first PHP component to be established. It has since become the most preferred package used by web designers and developers. Three years later, a community of contributors adopted the PEAR innovation and facilitated its official public release in January 2003. However, the PHP pear was already being used by a multitude, especially in the PHP CVS servers.

The public release of PHP marked the introduction of the PEAR Installer and Package Manager. These pieces of infrastructure made it incredibly easy to retrieve packages from PEAR. It fueled the popularity of PEAR and saw to it that everyone had access to the development.

Why should you Choose Pear?

PHP is endowed with several built-in functions such as htmlentities () and strip_tags (), which are bent on simplifying the web application development process. Another advantage of the PHP PEAR is that it saves you time when working on a particular project. When scripting with PHP, there are common blocks of code that apply across different projects. If you had written such a code before, PEAR allows you to use it on a new project without having to rewrite the code. This saves you time and storage space.

PHP source codes are categorized by the domains in which they are applied. Pear specifically targets the Architecture Domain which can always be used in many applications. Pear has been implemented profoundly particularly when designing web applications. It provides solutions to numerous problems encountered by developers who major on building web apps.

PEAR::Validate function is one of the solutions to web app scripting problems. It provides an array of standard validation routines that allows developers to validate a URL, email addresses, and passwords to prevent XSS exploits. You can also use it to verify International Bank Account Numbers. By applying the validation routines across various PHP projects, you can save a lot of energy and time. In the end, you will have ample time to carry out thorough bug testing.

Conclusion

Though there are other alternatives such as the Composer, some projects still use PEAR thanks to its reliability. These are some of the PHP Pear facts you should know before attending a web development job interview. Do you have any comments or thought on PEAR? Share them in the comments section below.