Planet PHP

If you are interested in learning more about applying common design patterns to your applications and are able to understand German, we have good news for you. Your first chance to get information about pattern driven development from the Stubbles developers is the International PHP 2007 Conference in November, where Frank and I will be giving a half-day workshop on PHP Design Patterns. As Frank wrote last month, we are also giving some more 1-hour talks at this conference.

Your second chance to learn more about design patterns is the new German professional PHP training organized by Wolfgang Drews. The course consists of 12 different sessions, I'll be giving the talks about OO developement and PHP design patterns. Other trainers include Christian Wenz, Tobias Schlitt, Kore Nordmann and Tobias Hauser. The best part about this course is, that is an online training and you do not even have to leave the house. More information can be found at the course website or Wolfgang's blog.

If you prefer to read or cannot afford any of the above options, there still is my book PHP Design Patterns published by O'Reilly.

Are you looking for a job? Are you living in Germany? Do you like Java?

If you answer all these questions with 'yes' and would like to work with the Stubbles' developers, than you should apply for a job in my team. We are looking for two Java Web Developers, that are also familiar with XML/XSLT and OOD/OOA. Knowledge of other languages like PHP or Javascript are helpful, if you are applying for this job, as you might end up developing with Stubbles. If you are interested, take a look at the (German) job description.

To ease the deployment of Stubbles applications and new versions of the framework, Frank "invented" the Stubbles Archive (also referred to as STAR). This allows us to create a single file, that contains all PHP class files as well as other resources (like XML documents or XSL templates) that are required by Stubbles in one single file. This file can be included just like you would include any other PHP file:

require stubConfig::getLibPath() . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'stubbles.php'; // now, the classloader is available and can be used stubClassLoader::load('net.stubbles.xml.stubXMLStreamWriterFactory');
Of course, this does not load all classes in the archive, but just the base classes, that are needed to run the application, by making use of the __halt_compiler() function. All other classes will be loaded from the same file using PHP's stream wrapper API. Of course, this results in a performance loss, but according to our profiling, the loss is minimal.

Greg Beaver and Marcus Börger developed a similar format (based on PHP_Archive in PEAR), but implemented it in C and released it as phar in the PECL repository. Currently, the PHP core developers are discussing, whether this extension should be added to the core in the next version of PHP. Since the announcement of the phar extension, we decided that we will deprecate STAR in favor of phar, once it stabilized and got included into the core. Currently, it seems, that this will not happen in any 5.x version of PHP, so this is another candidate for my PHP 6 wishlist.

I think, it would be a great addition to PHP (from a developer's and marketing point of view) to bundle libraries and applications in one single file and deploy them by copying them to a specified folder. When using STAR for deployment you get a StarClassRegistry, that knowns about all available classes in any STAR-archive that has been deployed. Loading a class from any archive gets extremely easy:

require '/path/to/starReader.php'; include StarClassRegistry::getUriForClass('com.example.MyClass');

The getUriForClass() method scans all archives and will cache the results so they are only scanned once. Having something along those lines backed by a C implementation would be a huge benefit, IMHO. Combining this with namespaces would be great as we finally would introduce unique names for our classes.

And yes, I still know, that PHP is not Java. If I want to develop in Java, I do this at work...

Today, Frank and I did a session about annotations in PHP at the International PHP Conference 2007 - Spring edition. The slides give you an overview, how annotations are used in Stubbles and how you can leverage them in your own application.



A PDF version of the slides is also available on the Stubbles download page.

I'm using static properties quite a lot, often in combination with static classes. This is, where I often encounter a major drawback in PHP. It is not possible to write code like this:
<?php class Foo { private static $bar = new Bar(); public static function getBar() { return self::$bar; } public static function modifyBar() { self::$bar->doSomething(); } } ?>
In PHP. it is not possible to initialize a property with an object.
As long as a constructor is involved, this is no problem, as the workaround is to initialize this properties in the constructor:
<?php class Foo { private $bar; public function __construct() { $this->bar = new Bar(); } } ?>
But how could this be solved, when you never create an instance of Foo but only use static method calls? Continue reading "My wishlist for PHP6, pt4: static initializers"

Yesterday I received the latest issue of the German PHP Magazin. This issue features an article on annotations, that also covers Stubbles extended reflection features. The article gives a short introduction to Stubbles and explains, how to use the annotations of the XMLSerializer component. Furthermore it shows how to create your own annotations in Stubbles.

The second half of the article deals with SOA (Service Oriented Architectures) and shows, how SCA_SDO (a reference implementation of SOA) makes use of annotations to convert components to services and automatically handles dependency injection of local or remote services.

If you are interested in using either of the two projects, consider buying an issue of the PHP Magazin 3.07.