PHP

Looks as if we have the next member in the "I want to become Caliph instead of the Caliph" club: PHPreboot

This is just a braindump of thoughts on the various bullet points and examples on the projects home page (but i don't think it's worth any more time to analyze it and comment on it either):

• less $, less ';' like in javascript

Not sure whether this is really an improvement, while $ and ; are not really necessary from a parsers (or lazy typers) point of view they do carry some context information ... so this is breaking the "The burden shall be on the writer, not the readers" principle IMHO

• secure by default: no eval, no magic quotes/string interpolation

Yes, that's all that needs to be disabled to guarantee secure code ... NOT

Magic quotes were a bad idea, but for slightly different reasons. eval() by itself is not a bad idea either if used properly, same as with backticks, system(), popen(), ...

And just by disabling magic quotes and eval() you do not make code secure by default, XSS and SQL injections can still happen without these, and i'd bet that most malicious code injections in vulnerable PHP apps were not using eval() but include/require as attack vector to make PHP execute their own code ... want to forbid these, too?

• full unicode support

That's a good thing, we may just have different ideas of "full" ...

• no from/to string auto-conversion

I do like the "to" part of it ... not really sure about the "from" part ...

• a SQL compatible syntax

Which SQL dialect? And looking at the code: how would i handle queries against multiple database connections?

• Perl 5 regex literal

I personally prefer to write preg_match() literally ... but that may be just me and my PERL allergy ...

• URI/file literal

I don't see that much gain in that one over explicit fopen(), ... calls either

• fast as Java thanks to a runtime profiler/optimizer and JSR 292 API

There's room for improvement in PHP optimizers and op code caches for sure ...

In my personal use cases a JVM based PHP would actually be a loss though. Most stuff i'm using PHP for these days is medium complex command line stuff (like my code generators), and for most of this my PHP scripts are already done with their job in a time that would not even be sufficient for a JVM to initialize and execute the very first byte code op of my user code

There's also the more general issue that when going the way of the JVM you either go bytecode all the way and have to say goodbye to all the PHP extensions that are actually just thin wrappers around native C libraries, re-implement those libraries functionality in a language supported by the JVM or go the way of JNI ...

• provide an embedded database derby and a standalone web server grizzly by default

... instead of SQLite and ?forgot-the-name-of-the-upcoming-integrated-webserver-thingy? ...?

• native XML syntax

Sorry, can't see how that's "native XML syntax", PHP and its use of XML processing instruction syntax is as native as you can get, hiding executable code in DATA not so much

• Language as close as possible to PHP

Sorry but even that simple example does not really look like PHP to me as all. Maybe part of that is due to the use of "elseif" instead of "else if". I haven't seen any PHP code using "elseif" in years, i even had to double check that it works in this context and not just in the IF: ... ELSEIF: ... ENDIF; form.

• native XQuery

Again i'm not sure whether i want to have that on the Syntax level ...

• [...]

So to summarize:

• the language does hardly look like PHP anymore (actually looks more like a PERL/Python chimera to me personally)
• the language will not be backwards compatible to PHP syntax wise (afaict)
• the language will not have many of the functionality that PHP gets from native C libraries

=> so why should it have the letters PHP in its name at all?

I confess that i've been hiding under a stone for quite some time when it comes to contemporary HTML stuff, for most of the things i'm doing on the presentation level even good old HTML 1.0 would be sufficient if it weren't for the occasinal tabular data ...

So while i know CSS in theory i've never really looked into the black magic of doing CSS layouts and stuff ... until now ...

What i'm up to right now was to produce a small series of step by step examples on how to use OpenLayers to present customized OpenStreetMap based maps, and for that i wanted to have a simple layout like this:

I'm talking at the MySQL User Conference once again this year presenting my Code Generators for MySQL Plugins and User Defined Functions in a formal session this time after my original "pizza & hacking" session on this topic on the 2006 UC (which ended up in hacking some other things on the way first ... photographs may follow ...).

The plugin and UDF code generators are based on the same foundation as my "pecl-gen" generator for PHP extensions so this might be of interest for hardcore PHP folks, too.

For more information see the Conference Schedule.

I released version 0.9.8 of my MySQL UDF code generator yesterday and i finally moved development over to my own php-baustelle.de family of sites.

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

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.

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