Appendix E. Using PEAR and PHPUnit

If you’re going to use PHP as a web development language, why not make use of the wealth of packages that have already been written for it? The community has turned out in force to write an enormous amount of add-ons, a whole host of which have been combined in PEAR (the PHP Extension and Application Repository). Among these submissions is MDB2, a powerful package that makes it easier to access MySQL. Table E-1 lists some of the PEAR packages.

Table E-1. Categories of PEAR packages (number in each category)

Authentication (8)	Filesystem (5)	Math (19)	Streams (2)
Caching (2)	Gtk Components (4)	Networking (55)	Structures (30)
Console (7)	Gtk2 Components (7)	Numbers (2)	System (8)
Database (31)	HTML (40)	Payment (4)	Text (19)
Date and Time (22)	HTTP (14)	PEAR (18)	Tools & Utilities (9)
Encryption (13)	Images (19)	PEAR Website (5)	Validate (29)
Event (2)	Internationalization (6)	PHP (20)	Web Services (40)
File Formats (33)	Mail (8)	Semantic Web (5)	XML (32)