You can learn more
about PEAR in Chapter 11. In the coming chapters you??™ll learn about many of these
libraries and several PEAR packages.
CHAPTER 1 ?– INTRODUCING PHP 9
Possibility
PHP developers are rarely bound to any single implementation solution. On the
contrary, a user is typically fraught with choices offered by the language. For example,
consider PHP??™s array of database support options. Native support is offered for more
than 25 database products, including Adabas D, dBase, Empress, FilePro, FrontBase,
Hyperwave, IBM DB2, Informix, Ingres, InterBase, mSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL,
Oracle, Ovrimos, PostgreSQL, Solid, Sybase, Unix dbm, and Velocis. In addition,
abstraction layer functions are available for accessing Berkeley DB??“style databases.
Several generalized database abstraction solutions are also available, among the most
popular being PDO (http://www.php.net/pdo) and MDB2 (http://pear.php.net/
package/MDB2). Finally, if you??™re looking for an object relational mapping (ORM) solution,
projects such as Propel (http://propel.phpdb.org/trac/) should fit the bill
quite nicely.
PHP??™s flexible string-parsing capabilities offer users of differing skill sets the
opportunity to not only immediately begin performing complex string operations
but also to quickly port programs of similar functionality (such as Perl and Python)
over to PHP. In addition to more than 85 string-manipulation functions, both POSIX-
and Perl-based regular expression formats are supported.
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