Every major language has thousands of libraries which enable programmers to reach higher, further and faster than before. Package managers (the online systems for sharing code) are key to a language's success; Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Node.js all have strong offerings. But which one is the best and what can we learn from each of them? This article is the first in a two-part series where I review each package manager. Part one focuses on searching and using packages and part two will look at how easy it is to upload and share packages.

PHP is not merely awkward to use, or ill-suited for what I want, or suboptimal, or against my religion. I can tell you all manner of good things about languages I avoid, and all manner of bad things about languages I enjoy. Go on, ask! It makes for interesting conversation. PHP is the lone exception. Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.) PHP is an embarrassment, a blight upon my craft. It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered amateur who’s yet to learn anything else, as to be maddening. It has paltry few redeeming qualities and I would prefer to forget it exists at all. But I’ve got to get this out of my system. So here goes, one last try.

Sonar PHP Plugin provides PHP language support to Sonar. The plugin enables all Sonar builtin features for PHP projects. It relies on well known analysis tools for PHP: PHP Unit, PHP Depend, PHPMD, PHPCPD and PHP_CodeSniffer to provide some additionnal metrics and to detect violations.

sux0r 2.1.0 is a blogging package, an RSS aggregator, a bookmark repository, and a photo publishing platform with a focus on Naive Bayesian categorization and probabilistic content.

OpenID enabled (version 1.1); as both a consumer and a provider.

The PHP/Java Bridge is an implementation of a streaming, XML-based network protocol, which can be used to connect a native script engine, for example PHP, Scheme or Python, with a Java virtual machine. It is up to 50 times faster than local RPC via SOAP, requires less resources on the web-server side. It is faster and more reliable than direct communication via the Java Native Interface, and it requires no additional components to invoke Java procedures from PHP or PHP procedures from Java.