[Phpgroupware-developers] phpGW and PEAR

[Dan Kuykendall]

I spent a solid month or so on learning PEAR and how it could work for 
phpGW.
A couple people have asked about how this worked out, and I will give a 
more indepth explaination, but in short it didnt.

PEAR largly requires the user to have a higher level of ownership over 
the server than we do.

PEAR does offer some really nice features, which I really hoped to 
leverage. I did start making contributions to PEAR and will continue to 
do so, because its a pretty good collection of code. But I did not find 
a way for phpGW to peacefully run on top of PEAR.

A couple problems are:
1) Path structure is very diff than our own
2) far diff coding standard which will cause a good deal of confusion. 
This could only be resolved by phpGW adopting the PEAR coding standards 
(yuck)
3) Server ownership requirements. For example if a server admin has a 
version of pear turned on in the php.ini that is incompatible with one 
we use, then it could cause a great deal of problems, since we cannot 
disable the admins version.
4) Additional overhead. PEAR has overhead of its own to deal with. This 
does come at a performance cost.
5) Maturity. PEAR is getting heading toward becoming a mature project, 
but they still have a ways to go. There are still a lot of debates about 
basic issues. In time this will all be worked out, but for now its a 
concern.
6) Migration hassles. It will be a MAJOR task to convert all our base 
classes for accounts/prefs and DB abstraction to the PEAR versions. I 
dont see that it is currently something we can take on without bring the 
project to a complete halt in the mean time.

These are the ones off the top of my head. I will document this stuff in 
greater detail to allow someone else to pick up on my work if they want 
to see if the issues can be solved.

Dan