A Day in Paradise

By: Stefan Neufeind

Less than a week after PHP Conference in Frankfurt it was time for a trip to Frankfurt again. As last year we had an exhibition booth in the .org pavillion of the LinuxWorld Expo, next to the people from Free Software Foundation and right across from KDE. Unfortunately no PEAR-related talk made it into the LinuxWorld conference-program this year (too many submissions), but we got a 30-minute-slot on the info-stage in the exhibition part of LinuxWorld. It was good to see about 40 interested people listening closely. This reflects growing interest and demand for flexible application-design using PEAR.

In contrast to last year it was good to see that more and more visitors already knew about PEAR and what they have to offer. But for sure we could also convince some new ones that this might be the right choice to consider when building their next PHP applications. The people from eGroupware even thought about using the PEAR-installer for distributing their application and using dependencies from PEAR as well as other channels. Let’s see - that sounds promising.

Besides all good words some “suggestions for improvement” should not be overheard as well. It was mentioned by several visitors that the documenation might need major improvements. For some packages it either does not exist, just covers a general start into the topic or is simply outdated. Some people also desperately searched the web for examples after installing a package, not noticing that usually at least a few basic examples are shipped as part of the package. For those who worked with PEAR already it seems we offer a valuable resource. For all others the barrier to entry might be a problem.

And what’s up next year? PEAR at LinuxWorld again? Well, last year in my eyes LinuxWorld was good. This year far less exhibitors / projects were present, which in my eyes resulted in a noticable less interesting expo. But next year the situation is completely new because LinuxWorld is moving to Cologne. Why? Well, LinuxTag is moving from Karlsruhe to Wiesbaden in 2006, which is close to Frankfurt. LinuxWorld decided to flee from LinuxTag - well, that’s up to the personal feeling of the reader