I have contacted Joshua Eichorn author of HTML_AJAX for an interview in the AJAX Magazine. The interview was more focused on AJAX and Josh experience with HTML_AJAX but I tryed to ask about PEAR more specificly. Note that Joshua is also the author of PHPDocumentator :
Hatem : You started contributing to PEAR project with the popular PhpDocumentor and today HTML_AJAX, can you tell us about your PEAR experience ?
I’ve been involved in PEAR since pretty early in its existence, I started out lurking and eventually became more involved through phpDocumentor. PEAR has always been an interesting experience, it contains a large number of strong developers who always seem to have an opinion on every issue. This has made for some trying times in the past as PEAR tried to refine it goals. In the past year or so PEAR has been a pleasure to work with, the new package acceptance process works well, and new developers have been very accepting to feedback. Its also been great to get extra help from the PEAR QA team on maintaining phpDocumentor since i’m no longer doing much actual development on it.
You can read the complete interview in the AJAX Magazine.
The latest version of HTML_AJAX is currently 0.3.4 and include many bug fixes and getting ready for the first beta by start testing the framework architecture :
* Fix for Bug #6478 problems with assignAttr in HTML_AJAX_Action
* Add a flag (HTML_AJAX->php4CompatCase) that allows for exporting all introspected method/class names in php5 in lower case for php4 compat
* Update to the newest Services_JSON code, still waiting for a Services_JSON release so we can stop embedding it * Getting extra Request timeouts errors
* Fix bug #6564, Don’t send Content-Length header when output buffering is enabled
* Fix bug #6295, Use std input when HTTP_RAW_POST isn’t set
* Fix for Main.js compatibility function tests
* Patch from Julien Wajsberg, Keep extra query params passed to HTML_AJAX_Server in the default serverUrl, this helps when integrating with frameworks
* Fix bug #6478, Not possible to set className in firefox using HTML_AJAX_Action, now were setting the attribute directly instead of calling setAttribute
