Last night I installed a Pear channel on my Aspire One so thought about sharing the installation process with you. You might have a look at Greg Beaver's howto, three years old but it's the official installation, add it to your bookmarks anyway.

First if you don't have a LAMP already run

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

Then follow the installation process, which documented here.

Then we need to install PEAR iself :

sudo apt-get install php-pear

You can make sure that pear is correctly installed by running:

pear -V

I recommend you to use ubuntu pear package instead of downloading go-pear.phar and install it manually.

Continue reading "Setup Your Own Pear Channel on Ubuntu 9.04" »

Posted by Hatem at 6:38 PM to Pear | Tutorial | Permalink | Comments (0)

To celebrate their five years birthday, Packt Publishing offered five books FREE for download. Books include Building Online Communities with phpBB 2, Invision Power Board: A User Guide, Building Websites with e107, and The PEAR Installer Manifesto. Since there is not much books about PEAR, here is one of the few ones available for download free : the PEAR installer manifesto, written by Gregory Beaver, 296 pages and published by Packt on October 30, 2006. The book covers the PEAR Installer version 1.4.0 onwards. Current PEAR stable version is 1.8.1.

This book will show you a new way of organizing your PHP development, by leveraging the full power of the PEAR Installer. In a sense, the PEAR Installer is a step above a software design pattern, a meta-development pattern that can be used to systematically organize all of your PHP development.

You will learn how to organize your code into packages using the package.xml format. You will learn about the revolutionary new PEAR Channel concept, and how to safely and reliably depend on external PHP libraries from sources such as pear.php.net and other PEAR channels. You will learn about the PEAR_PackageFileManager package, and how to customize individual installations of your PHP code through file roles, file tasks, and post-installation scripts.

Update July 8, 2009 : Packt website is encountering some technical issues, we are not able to download also from their website. We notified packt many times about these issues but nothing until today ! There is no need to send us again asking how to download.We'll update this post when service will be back.

Posted by Hatem at 9:53 AM to Books | Pear | Permalink | Comments (0)

Zend DevZone have an interesting new tutorial on paging data using PEAR Pager package. In this tutorial, Vikram introduced the different paging features in the Pager package whatever the data is fixed arrays, retrieved from database, or XML files. The last sample shows how to search database with advanced paging options where you can switch pages and set Items per pages for results.

Over the next few pages, I'm going to give you a quick run-down on the PEAR Pager class, together with a few examples of how you can integrate it with various Web applications while still looking calm and collected.

Posted by Hatem at 12:06 PM to Pear | Tutorial | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two great news for the PEAR community, now the PEAR project got an official blog available at blog.pear.php.net. The blog will be used for announcements, sharing ideas with the community, and general information about the PEAR project. The second good news is that PEAR Installer 1.6.0 have been released with some bugfixes and improvements including :

• minor improvements to the output of list-all, list, list-upgrades, search. Channel is displayed for many of these commands by default, and with an optional switch for the others
• implementation of code coverage reports using xdebug for .phpt-based tests with the pear run-tests command. This is somewhat experimental, and bug reports are expected on this new feature, but problems found will be fixed in 1.6.1

Greg previously announced Pyrus, the next generation of PEAR installer which is currently available in the PEAR2 CVS.

Posted by Hatem at 8:37 PM to Pear | Permalink | Comments (0)

I upgraded last week to Cpanel 11 which will be available as stable by June 13, and one of the new features that I just noticed is the integration of the PEAR installer. After login to Cpanel11, under the software box choose "PHP PEAR Package" and it will lead you to the PHP PEAR installer. The installer will first check the config automatically and update PEAR channel, then you will get the installer interface as you see it in the screenshot below :

The news with Cpanel11 is that system packages are separated from user packages which will be installed under /home/username/php, this will give users more freedom to search for the package that they are looking for and install it directly from the official PEAR repository, without having to ask the hosting provider to support a package or another. You can find over the hosting magazine 10 steps to upgrade to Cpanel 11 if you can't wait for the stable release.

Posted by Hatem at 7:40 PM to Pear | Permalink | Comments (1)

The PEAR election is over, PEAR Group team, which will be the governing body of the project, now officially include 8 members : Martin Jansen, Arnaud Limbourg, Joshua Eichorn, Christian Weiske, Helgi Thormar, Paul M. Jones, Justin Patrin, and David Coallier. The elected group will be able to decide about the future of the project according to the new constitution. Notice that this is more about the organisations of the group, and who is able to take major decisions, but will not affect a lot the PEAR project as coding or as project itself. From the constitution summary :

The PEAR Group only has power over issues that affect all of PEAR such as coding standards, CVS karma, and all major decisions made about PEAR as a whole. For example, licenses allowed and what defines a collective are two issues that only the PEAR Group can resolve.

Joshua, who is now a member of the group, called for comments to share ideas and would you improve the PEAR project. Hope to see some important changes in the future to make people profit more from the PEAR project and make packages adoption more easy for enterprise.

Posted by Hatem at 1:21 PM to Pear | Permalink | Comments (0)