In response to several other posts lately about the PEAR::DB package in PEAR (and things that could be done to improve it), David Coallier got a bit fed up and shared his opinion - "PEAR::DB is deprecated, got it?"

All new features are made into MDB2 and not DB, the only thing that is being done on DB is security fixes. So MDB2 is first of all, faster, smaller (Because of it's driver and modularity), easier, and has more features (LOB handling, Iterator, etc) and better end-user documentation, quite solid docs indeed.

Of course, the comments of the post are full of people arguing to keep it around and others that agree with David, especially in light of a MDB2 driver for the Zend Framework he mentions.

Going along with the Roadmap update Zend has recently put out about it's Framework, Andi Gutmans has also announced the introduction of more mailing lists to help developers communicate more effectively.

In line with the roadmap email, I'd like to form 8 new mailing lists which will make it easier for people to discuss/participate in subject areas which are of interest to them (actually 7 new ones as docs already exists).

I did think of calling the lists fwdev-* to note them as dev lists but I think it makes more sense to keep them open to the users. I find it very valuable to get users asking questions and commeting on functionality on the dev lists as that's valuable input from the users.

The new mailing lists up and running. They are:

• fw-webservices@
• fw-mvc@
• fw-auth@
• fw-i18n@
• fw-db@
• fw-core@
• fw-formats@

To check out the topics that fall under each category, check out the sections of the roadmap.

On CodePoets.co.uk today, a new tutorial introduces you to the PEAR DB package, giving you a howto guide on performing simple queries with its functionality.

They list a few reasons why one might want to use the PEAR DB package over the normal PHP database functions before they get into the examples. There are four examples - making the connection, querying the database, what to do to avoid SQL injections, and updating your database with prepared statements.