Ever wondered if there was more to your PHP installation than just the code that runs your apps? Looking for a good set of libraries that will help you enhance your code and create more cross-platform applications? Well, PEAR just might be the answer to these questions - and PHPBuilder's new article should cover the basics for you.

First off, for those not "in the know": PEAR stands for "PHP Extension and Application Repository" and has been slowly building itself over the last few years. There are classes for logging, compression, XML, and on and on. The most popular one is the database abstraction class, which supports most popular databases.

In the article they give you all sorts of code examples, including a PEAR class, an error class, a database class, and even a logging class for your use - all using the predefined PEAR functionality. The PEAR libraries are a nice way to keep things standardized in your application, so people can just put it where ever, but there's still some functionality missing. That and people generally tend to roll their own functions instead...