Advantages of PHAR archives in PHP

Question

PHP 5.3 has a new feature called PHAR similar to JAR in JAVA. It\'s basically a archive of PHP files. What are its advantages

Answer 1

In my experience, loosely packaged PHP source files sitting in a production environment invite tinkering with live code when a fix is needed. Deploying in a .phar file discourages this behaviour and helps reinforce better practices, i.e. build and test in a local environment, then deploy to production.