PHP, the universe and all the rest

And yet another library wrapper extension, this time for libbraille, a library providing a unified API for Braille output devices:

http://braille.php-baustelle.de/

I've tried to do this several times over the years but only now i managed to understand the inner works of the Graphiz libraries good enough to wrap things up into a PHP extension (i blame part of this on different Graphviz libraries defining multiple versions of the same function name ...).

We've had PHP Graphviz support in PEAR for quite a while but only by passing graph description files to graphviz binaries running in seperate processes and by collection their output files later.

Now it is possible to create graphs by adding nodes, edges and node and edge attributes to a graph within PHP itself. Different layout algorithms may be applied to a graph resource and the same graph can be rendered to several output formats. For example it is now possible to generate a PNG graph image and a HTML image map for the generated PNG image from the same graph resources by applying the gvc_render_file() function to the graph twice.

I've set up a Trac project site and provided a first 0.1.1 release in its Download section and on the php-baustelle channel server. Minimal documentation is available in the sites Manual section.

I've created a new cairo-wrapper release 0.2.1 today. Additions since the last released version 0.1.3 are:

• Cairo library version check
• Postscript support
• SVG support
• Font options and scaled fonts
• Transformation matrixes
• Fixed all outstanding bug reports (both of them
• Started to provide documentation

So by now almost all Cairo features are mapped ...

The new release is available from the php-baustelle PEAR channel and from the Download section of the project site.

PHP style documentation generated from the specification file is now integrated into the trac site in the Manual section.

It's always good to 'eat your own dog food' by trying to apply your own tools to new real life tasks ...

During my work on cairo_wrapper i stumbled across the need to conditionally compile certain functions into the generated extension based on the freatures enabled in the local cairo installation. Some of the cairo backends like PDF or SVG are optional and may not be available due to lack of certain helper libraries.

Up to now this could only be handled by putting an #if or #ifdef section into the function body, making it return false and throw a warning if a certain feature is not available. The PHP way to handle this would be to not make this function available at all then so that function_exists() can be used within PHP userland code to check for the availability of certain functions/features.

So i introduced a new *if=...* attribute for all code element tags. The *if* attribute takes a valid C preprocessor expression as its argument. The generated code will then have #if wrappers around
the code definition itself and around the registration lines, too, so that an element is never seen by PHP userland in any way if its *if* condition is not met.

Elements with an *if* attribute are:

* <class>
* <constant>
* <function>
* <global>
* <ini>
* <interface>
* <property>
* <resource>

I've recently started to create a Cairo wrapper extension.

The final goal of this extension is to provide an almost 1:1 API mapping between the Cairo C library and the PHP extension so that it becomes possible to do Cairo prototyping using PHP with an option to port code to C later with only minimal modifications.

I've made pretty good progress so far already but i've also spotted some areas where pecl-gen is still missing some usefull features.

Two things i've already added to CodeGen_PECL 1.0.1 are

• pkg-config support in generated config.m4 files
• support for conditional compilation of extension functions

and there is more to come like e.g conditional constant definitions.

You can watch my progress on the Cairo Wrapper Extension projects site.

I'm one of the usual suspects again.

My topics this year are

• Making use of MySQL Cluster with PHP
• PECL_Gen - a PHP extension code generator (surprise, surprise

How to stop working on an open source project:

- don't tell, just fade out
- do not send a final quit message
- do not talk about your reasons
- *especially* not on IRC

unless you want to be psychoanalyzed on /.

I revently added a new PHP function php_get_tmpdir() to return the path of the directory used by PHP to store temporary files (based on this feature request on bugs.php.net).

As i have received slight positive feedback on this on the internals mailing list and in private and as no objections came up so far i have now commited this function to CVS HEAD and added a documentation page for it to the manual.

Update: we're still discussing the final name and whether this will be in 5.2, too. Stay tuned ...

I finally found the time to fight my backlog on HTTP_WebDAV_Server bugs lately and created a new release candidate package for testing.

• PEAR package description
• download 1.0.0RC3

I'm going to php|tek, too, and i'll have two more talks there.

This is going to be sort of a stunt as the MySQL user conference and php|tek overlap, so i'll have to jump on a plane right after the MySQL conference is over to cross the USA. I also won't be able to attend any php|tek sessions myself as the last conference day only has two session time slots

My first talk will be on PHP and MySQL Cluster and after that i'll talk about PHP and WebDAV.

I'm going to have three different sessions on the MySQL User Conference:

ext/mysqli - The New Glue Between MySQL 4.1 and PHP5

This one is about the improved MySQL extension in PHP 5. Actually this is a followup to my very first User Conference talk back in 2003, but since then both MySQL 4.1 and PHP 5 have matured so its time to have another look at this dynamic duo again.

Using MySQL Cluster as a Distributed PHP Session Storage

Here i'm going to present together with my new german coworker Bernhard Ocklin, we are going to present how to make use of MySQL Cluster from within PHP and we are going to create a PHP session handler that can make use of a distributed MySQL Cluster for load balancing.

if you can't make it to this one you have a second chance on php|tek in Florida a few days later ...)

HackFest A: Creating New UDFs

This will be a hands on event in the evening. Jeremy Cole and i (and maybe some others, too), will help you to create MySQL User Defined Functions using C or C++.
So this sets a release date for my UDF Code Genertor tool.

Maybe we will even be able to show some first examples on how to create Plugins for MySQL 5.1

A few days ago i finally managed to clear up all my TODO items for a stable 1.0 release but one.

The one item that is still not finised is the the gerenartion of .w32 files for the new build system,
but i decided to finally do a stable release anyway as i will need help on this part and as it probably
won't happen before meeting some other developers in person on php|tek

For the release packages please check

• CodeGen
• CodeGen_PECL

Has this ever happened to you? (i bet it has):

  $ export PATH=$PAHT:/usr/local/foo/bin
  $ ls
  ls: command not found

It is so easy to have a typo in that PATH assignment, and so hard to recover from it (esp. when not using X11).