> And yes, I know PEAR but that's not very PHP5 at all.
Symfony uses pear to distribute itself. You can get Zend from pear. PHPUnit does as well. Numerous other highly respected PHP libs use pear. Granted, they use their own distribution channels, like Debian. Pear isn't intended to be a central hub, but rather a distribution method. Couple with this Pyrus (http://pear2.php.net/) and Pear2, it's widely used by experienced PHP developers. Then you have pecl on top of that.
The problem isn't pear or pecl or any of that. It's that people don't bother to learn what's out there. They just associate pear with PHP4 and leave it at that. This carries over.
The other problem is that your average PHP devs build environment isn't as server based as it is for perl or ruby. Most PHP people just upload a file directly to the server and refresh the web page.
I imagine most people would be surprised by the number of really cool and interesting things going on in the PHP world, but because it's PHP, they elect not to learn about it.
> Most of the good (and 'modern') PHP code is 'jailed' in frameworks right now or quite hard to find
That's another misconception. I think it's hard for 'new' people to PHP to get a handle on everything, and I think their would be great value in pulling it all together. The problem is, the people that know about all this stuff aren't new, and we haven't really stepped back to look. However, most modern frameworks are easy to mix and match, and use only the parts you want from it. Their is obviously cases where it could be improved, and their is always a push to do this better.
When I said PEAR I referred to the pear.php.net packages being PHP4 style and dependent on PEAR_Error and all. I am aware of the fact that Symfony and a couple of other large projects are available via PEAR distribution servers.
Haven't seen pear2.php.net before though but after a quick look just now - with just a couple of libs and hardly any updates in 2011, it doesn't look like it's doing very well. And again it seems to have dependencies and wants you to use custom error libraries.
And I am not sure what you mean to say regarding most code being jailed and this being a 'misconception'. If you aren't on PHP 5.3, you can't even find a lightweight (means not Doctrine) working standalone implementation of ActiveRecord, although lots of frameworks provide similar functionality. Just one example. And looking at the other comments here I don't seem to be the only one who noticed this.
And it's not that I am not seeing what's going on. I see that Symfony2 is making an effort but haven't worked with it yet. But I also see that I am watching 50+ repos of 'promising' more or less under-the-radar PHP 5.3 projects on github to prevent 'missing out' on something I could use in an upcoming project.
Just saying that it'd be great if someone steps up and manages to establish something like rubygems in the PHP world, most likely for PHP 5.3 and up, maybe based on phar but with emphasis on loose coupling, reusability and keeping things 'compact'. I don't have the perfect solution either, all up for discussion.
Symfony uses pear to distribute itself. You can get Zend from pear. PHPUnit does as well. Numerous other highly respected PHP libs use pear. Granted, they use their own distribution channels, like Debian. Pear isn't intended to be a central hub, but rather a distribution method. Couple with this Pyrus (http://pear2.php.net/) and Pear2, it's widely used by experienced PHP developers. Then you have pecl on top of that.
The problem isn't pear or pecl or any of that. It's that people don't bother to learn what's out there. They just associate pear with PHP4 and leave it at that. This carries over.
The other problem is that your average PHP devs build environment isn't as server based as it is for perl or ruby. Most PHP people just upload a file directly to the server and refresh the web page.
I imagine most people would be surprised by the number of really cool and interesting things going on in the PHP world, but because it's PHP, they elect not to learn about it.
> Most of the good (and 'modern') PHP code is 'jailed' in frameworks right now or quite hard to find
That's another misconception. I think it's hard for 'new' people to PHP to get a handle on everything, and I think their would be great value in pulling it all together. The problem is, the people that know about all this stuff aren't new, and we haven't really stepped back to look. However, most modern frameworks are easy to mix and match, and use only the parts you want from it. Their is obviously cases where it could be improved, and their is always a push to do this better.