Tuesday, February 20. 2007
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Posted by Stephan Schmidt
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No Stubbles, Planet PHP Comments (10) Trackbacks (2) |
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My wishlist for PHP 6, pt2: Namespaces
I won't go into detail here, as this topic has been discussed a thousand times on internals. Although prefixing all of your classes works, it still is a PITA. In Stubbles, we are prefixing all our classes with stub, which is fine, as it is a kind of funny prefix, but there are some cases, where this really sucks.
In our implementation of annotations (stay tuned for a tutorial on annotations), every annotation is converted to an object. In our first implementation, the class name had to be the same as the annotation name, but this leads to annotation names that aren't that beautiful to read The XMLSerializer component allows you to use the annotation @XMLTag to specify how an object should be serialized to XML. But the classname XMLTag should not b used as everybody could imagine a future xml extension grabbing the class name. To overcome this drawback, the annotation parser will pre- and postfix the annotation names, so the annotation @XMLTag loads a class called stubXMLTagAnnotation. Namespace support would help us get rid of these little annoyances, as we could import the XMLTag class from the package net.stubbles.xml.annotations. So unless someone comes up for a good reason against namespaces, they will hopefully be part of PHP 6.
BTW: Please spare me the "PHP is not Java" comments, as I already know this.
In our implementation of annotations (stay tuned for a tutorial on annotations), every annotation is converted to an object. In our first implementation, the class name had to be the same as the annotation name, but this leads to annotation names that aren't that beautiful to read The XMLSerializer component allows you to use the annotation @XMLTag to specify how an object should be serialized to XML. But the classname XMLTag should not b used as everybody could imagine a future xml extension grabbing the class name. To overcome this drawback, the annotation parser will pre- and postfix the annotation names, so the annotation @XMLTag loads a class called stubXMLTagAnnotation. Namespace support would help us get rid of these little annoyances, as we could import the XMLTag class from the package net.stubbles.xml.annotations. So unless someone comes up for a good reason against namespaces, they will hopefully be part of PHP 6.
BTW: Please spare me the "PHP is not Java" comments, as I already know this.
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PHP may not be Java, but it could sorely use this function. The ability to work in a non-faux namespace would be a heaven-sent.
Namespaces are absolutely necessary. I know of another framework that is used in our company which has about 1000 classes in its freely available version and another 5000 classes for the internal part. The more classes they add the more likely are class name clashes. Prefixing will surely not help in this cases.
Namespaces are planned or PHP 6 BUT it's a matter of finding a nice implementation (patch) for doing so. Do you have a patch? 
No, I don't. What happened to the patch by Jessie Hernandez?
Jessie is on the TODO page:
add namespace support (marcus, jessie)
add namespace support (marcus, jessie)
Anyone checked phpnamespaces.org?
You will find over there a nice patch with a implementation for namespaces for PHP 5.
It didnt get into PHP because the guy that wrote that patch has zero karma.
You will find over there a nice patch with a implementation for namespaces for PHP 5.
It didnt get into PHP because the guy that wrote that patch has zero karma.
Last time I checked phpnamespaces.org I got a "Topic does not exist" error 
Well, try an old revison of the front page: http://phpnamespaces.org/wiki/start?rev=1132852873
The patch is still here: http://phpnamespaces.org/nameserver-2005-11-22.patch
The patch is still here: http://phpnamespaces.org/nameserver-2005-11-22.patch
I agree that namespaces would be a great thing for PHP. The next step would be moving all of the PHP extensions into their own namespace.
I also remember seeing somewhere that PHP6 would implement namespaces but only for classes (I don't know where I saw it, so correct me if I am wrong). I think being able to put functions into a namespace would also be a "good thing". That way it would be possible to move all of the functions in each extension into their own namespace and finally clean up the global namespace.
If it is only implemented for objects, then why don't we make a push for a String object with all of the string functionality in it. And do the same for all of the other extensions that have a ton of functions filling up the global namespace. It would also make it easier for code completion in IDEs to know that they are working with a String and to only show completions for that type of object, etc.
Sorry about the long post.
I also remember seeing somewhere that PHP6 would implement namespaces but only for classes (I don't know where I saw it, so correct me if I am wrong). I think being able to put functions into a namespace would also be a "good thing". That way it would be possible to move all of the functions in each extension into their own namespace and finally clean up the global namespace.
If it is only implemented for objects, then why don't we make a push for a String object with all of the string functionality in it. And do the same for all of the other extensions that have a ton of functions filling up the global namespace. It would also make it easier for code completion in IDEs to know that they are working with a String and to only show completions for that type of object, etc.
Sorry about the long post.
The people at Zend have their F*&king heads up their asses! If there isn't namespaces in PHP6, I'm leaving PHP for something like Ruby that has namespaces and much much more....
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