Programmin' Prim8

Introduction:

PEAR is 'PHP Extension and Application Repository' (similar to CPAN for those perl users). It is a repository for public libraries for use with the popular PHP language, and also represents a set of PHP coding standards to encourage a unified style within the libraries.

In the past I simply wrote my own libraries for each task I wanted to accomplish, and then all my apps shared the same set of custom libs. Now, this is not a bad way to go, and you may be quite happy with the results, but if you want to use a more standardized approach, with code that has been peer reviewed and documented, then PEAR is for you.

Yawp is a framework that takes some of the base PEAR packages and combines them to use a unified config file and wrapper object. It can be a quick way to jumpstart into using a full set of PEAR packages for your application.

Installing PEAR:

If you have compiled a recent version of PHP (and not used --without-pear), then you may already have PEAR on your system. On fedora you could do:



Installing PEAR modules:

This bit is easy. You just need to do something like the following: (here are commands to install all the PEAR modules I'll be mentioning, and prerequisites).



If PEAR complains about dependencies, then simply install the dependency packages first (unless it happens to be something like: PHP version >= 5.0.0 is required).

If you want to install a non-stable package, use the full package name with the version:



Using PEAR:

Make sure that your PEAR repository is in your include_path. Edit php.ini and make sure you have something like this:



Then you can use the following from PHP:



PEAR References:

PEAR Manual - General information about PEAR.
PEAR Faq - Frequently Asked Questions.
Yawp Documentation - Getting started, function reference and example code for Yawp.
Package Documentation - Documentation for all PEAR packages can be found here. Find your package, then click 'Documentation', and then either 'End-User Documentation' or 'Documentation for latest release'.

Next Part:

In my next post I'll discuss using Yawp as the base framework for your web application.

Usually when you need to order lists on the web, you use one of 2 methods:

• Put a numeric input box next to each item and type in the sort order (quick but not very intuitive)


• Put up/down arrows next to each item and to a lot of reloading (intuitive but not very quick)

This seems to put an end to those problems:

DOM-Drag - javascript drag-drop lib.
Javascript drag-and-drop ordered lists - ordered list example.
Drag-and-drop Sortable Lists with JavaScript and CSS - takes the ordered list and puts some nice styles on it.

All you need to do to send the data back to the server is to use DOM to write the new order into a hidden input and then submit the form when done, or send the data realtime using ajax.