phpPatterns has a new article this morning about the "coming of age" of the PEAR libraries that are bundled with PHP on current installs.

This new piece talks less about the future of PHP, including PHP5, and more about PEAR and what it is, and where it's going. PEAR's original mission is to be PHP's equivalent to CPAN - personally think it's getting there. What's more, with PHP 5 and some of the new features like exception handling, there's a good chance we'll see PEAR striding towards a Java-like library.

Of course, not everyone sees PEAR as the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it is quite useful to a lot of people out there. The classes and methods that it provides are ingrained into several of the leading web applications. Wouldn't it be nice to install a web app and not have 100 new files on your drive, and, instead have it use the PEAR libraries already installed?