PECL Picks - Extensions to make your life better

PECL is undergoing a transformation, new developers, new tools, and a clearing away of the old cruft. Learn the history and idea behind PECL and where the future is leading, and who is involved in the process.

Then take a walk through PECL and learn about the best and the brightest. PECL extensions fall into three rough categories. Library wrappers take a C library and bring the functionality to PHP, general libraries add new functionality to PHP through internal C code, and engine level extensions allow you to do cool things with PHP.

Each extension will have a brief overview, who maintains it, the requirements and purpose of the extension, and a quick "how to use it". There are 184 extensions in PECL and more on the way, we'll see how many useful ones fit into an hour.