The PEAR aspect of the name refers to the PEAR repository. We try to use as much open source code as possible and as much of the PEAR repository as possible will be included in the framework. Currently only the Archive, Crypt, DB, HTML, SOAP and PHPmailer have been included but others will follow when required. If new functionality is required we first look at the PEAR repository to check whether it has some functionality there that we can use. If it does and it looks okay we build a component wrapper (if required) and add it into the framework.

The framework itself is relatively simple. It’s a bunch of components that support events or call backs. The components are based off of the Delphi model. Some are visual components such as THtmlPage, TLabel, TButton, THtmlEdit and others are non visual such as TQuery and TDBFactory.

Recently Codegear (formally called Borland) released Delphi for PHP and the components that come with that are also based off of the original Delphi Component Framework. We may eventually move our framework to use this model as it comes with a nice IDE but its far too early at this stage to say that we definitely will.