Working towards Pyrus and PEAR2, check it out or miss out

Hello all.  It's been a very busy time for me, what with suddenly having a full gaggle of new cello students to teach at UNL as well as a fully loaded performance schedule for the quartet, but I have been finding time to code.  My priority has been the push towards PEAR2, which means that in addition to attempting to mediate the discussions of what should change from PEAR to PEAR2, I'm churning out code to turn its installer, Pyrus, from vaporware into actual code.

Along these lines, there has been significant progress.  The code has been developed on PHP 5.2, but will most likely target PHP 5.3 with the introduction of namespaces.  Pyrus completely revamps the way things are done.  By using SPL as well as extensions like XMLReader and XMLWriter, Pyrus manages to pack in far more features inside the code while literally cutting thousands of lines of code.  The biggest loser has been the package.xml handling code.  More than 2500 lines of code have gone byebye, but the API for reading from and creating package.xml is now as intuitive or more intuitive than simplexml.

In addition, using interfaces, a few design patterns and some clever iterators, adding support for a customized packaging solution is a matter of creating a class with a few lines of code that accepts file contents and where to save them.  Pyrus does the hard work of constructing the relative path of files within the archive and pre-processing their contents using file tasks.

The code is simple enough that I wrote a simple channel server with no dependencies except for Pyrus in less than 6 hours (just finished the initial work when my battery ran out today) that allows small channels to work without needing a database or even PHP on the channel server, as all the REST files and releases can be generated and then uploaded from a dev server.

In short, it's an exciting time to be involved in PEAR.  If you've been ignoring PEAR, perhaps it is time to take another look?