You mean the other PHP clients, or other clients in general?
If you mean the PHP clients:
- Denis’ one - No value in keeping it at all IMHO. Not only is it buggy, but both ayfan’s client and mine can do everything it can do, and much more, both more conveniently. The only legitimate reason anyone has to use it is that it’s PHP 5.2 compatible, but so is ayufan’s client, so that’s a somewhat poor excuse too.
- ayufan’s one - There’s some value in it. I haven’t used it, nor have I seen people in the forum use it, so I can’t comment on stability. I don’t really like most of the approaches from an “elegance” standpoint, but what constitutes “elegant” is always debatable. In fact, that client has some features* that I’ve only added in my client in the cutting edge (not yet released) version, so I guess you could sort of call it inspirational… except that my inspiration came from a forum user, and not looking at the client, but that’s beside the point - it could serve as an inspiration for authors of clients for other languages.
- vthinkteam’s sparks framework client - as I’ve said in his topic, I don’t like the fact that this client provides only an extremely reduced subset of functionality, but in the (IMHO) unlikely event that one needs that subset specifically AND uses the sparks framework, I must admit it would be easier to use that client instead of any other**, so… I guess keep it for the few people it might be helpful to.
If we’re talking in general - of course there’s value in keeping them… for now… since it’s always better to have some client than none at all. Besides, the Perl client used to be flawed, but it got fixed. As long as there’s someone to be “in charge” of a client, it would get fixed/extended more swiftly.
- indexing of the result by property.
** Other clients (mine included) could potentially be made to be as easy to use as that client for all of RouterOS’ functionality if the API protocol implements a way to tell clients about the available commands, arguments, menus and properties. Perhaps something like my proposal for a “/help” command.