Dynamically Typed has a look today at one of the more useful projects in the PEAR repository - File_Archive.

I am getting ready to release a major new version (1.2) of one of my products. One of the features of this allows you to automatically generate zip, tar, gzip and bzip files of your product so they can be distributed to your customers. You upload the files, and the application generates the archive.

When I was writing this section of code, I spent quite a long time looking for classes to help with the archive generation. I looked in a lot of places and tried several classes - they worked, but not fully. I eventually settled on a PEAR class called File_Archive, which is extremely good!

He talks about some of its features, including the fact that's its still very much in active development. He gets into some details on how it works (readers, writers, caching) and gives a handy function using it to create an archive simply by calling a function...