Thursday, 8 February 2007

Tutorial on Publishing Your Own PEAR Channels

Nathan A. Good over at the IBM web site has posted a tutorial guiding you on how to publish your own PEAR channels. This tutorial introduces channels, which you can use for package management in V1.4 and later versions of the PEAR package manager. It introduces some commands to use with the package manager for discovering, viewing, and deleting channels.

He further informs that he wrote this tutorial to provide a base on which to build a custom channel server. As a few packages are available for implementing a channel server, the server requirements may not work in your enterprise, he says. To serve this purpose, he gives examples and steps in the tutorial to implement a server that works for you.

He says this tutorial uses a scenario where a contrived company, which has the intranet domain example.net, has decided to build a private channel and publish domain-specific packages to the channel. The package used throughout is called Account, and it presumably contains classes and methods for dealing with accounts in a manner specific to the owner of example.net.

He talks about the prerequisites before getting started with the article. He says you should be familiar with installing and updating PEAR packages. Also, you need to know the basics of PHP V5, and you should be familiar with editing and creating XML files. He further says that having a good working knowledge of XML Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) and using the pear/XML_RPC package will help to understand the examples used in the tutorial in a clear manner.

He gives the following requirements for the examples to work. The following has to be installed, configured, and run:

• A web server that can run PHP scripts
• Write access to a document directory on the Web server (For example, C:\Inetpub\wwwroot or /var/www/)
• An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for editing and validating XML, or equivalent tools
• PEAR V1.4 and later (the version used for this tutorial was 1.4.11)
• XML_RPC V1.4.0 or later