PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, contains hundreds of freely available packages that can be reused in your application. Packages usually come with various functionality within one or more classes, and the PEAR coding standards make sure packages follow the same general style for ease of implementation. Best of all; they’re all entirely open source, from MIT to GPL.
However, many of these packages are bloated, slow and full of specialised features that you may never want to use. Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it’s hard to tell what you want when you don’t know what’s available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful.
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