We would definitely welcome any php contributions. If you have any specific fixes or updates or anything, PR’s would be more than welcome. It would be great if someone with some PHP expertise could take some ownership in collecting various fixes/enhancements from various locations and getting pull requests submitted for review. That would be awesome.
At this point, we won’t be splitting out the various languages to separate repositories. We have discussed it in the past and we MAY do it in the future, but right now we’re trying to concentrate on getting 1.9 out (and then likely a patch or two follow up) and splitting the repo right now would be too disruptive to that process. Dan > On Dec 18, 2018, at 1:26 AM, Gildas Quéméner <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Hello, > > We've been working for a few months on using Avro encoded messages between > our services in my company. > > Our backend heavily relies on PHP, whereas some orbiting services are > written in Java/Kotlin/Python. > At first glance, the lake of official support for PHP looked like a big > no-go for us. > > I know that there is an official library, embedded in the avro library at > https://github.com/apache/avro/tree/master/lang/php/lib. > > However this library suffers from blocking issues: > - It is not available through the de facto standard Composer dependency > manager > - It is not tested > - It does not rely on autoloading PSR > - It uses global namespace > - It uses unknown php functions > - It lacks some spec features (support for logicalType attribute for > instance) > - It is buggy > > Despite these issues, latest commit is 1 year old (about a typo), and the > one before that is almost 3 years old. Thus, I think it is safe to say that > this library is not maintained anymore. > > Many organizations have realized such issue and have created their own fork > of the library, none of them being thoroughly maintained and having the > same level of bug fixing. > > Here are a few examples: > - https://github.com/wikimedia/avro-php > - https://github.com/flix-tech/avro-php > - https://github.com/researchgate/avro-php > - https://gitlab.com/Jaumo/avro-php (I am the maintainer of this one) > > I have tried to contribute to Wikimedia's fork, but they also seem to have > dropped support (see activity in > https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/status:open+project:avro-php). The awesome > thing is that they have brought a test suite (that we are reusing in our > fork)! > > Flix-tech is doing an awesome job at providing a Schema Registry API client > as well as an Avro Serializer/Deserializer using their Schema Registry > client. > > There are great initiatives out there to modernize this library, but none > of them trully gather the focus of the many maintainers, scattered through > private organizations. > > I think it is time to give avro-php some love and I would like to help in > this matter. > > My feeling is that the first step should be to open a separate git > repository under the hood of the ASF organization. > This could either be done through an automatic subtree of > https://github.com/apache/avro/tree/master/lang/php/lib to a read-only > repository (as Symfony is doing), in order to register it on packagist.org > or through the opening of a separate read/write repository (and the removal > of the lib from the avro lib repository). > > Second step is to communicate, directly by contacting fork maintainers > annoucing the good news, and through ASF official communication vectors > (thinking about ML, Twitter, ...). The goal being to bring back all the PHP > avro user to an official implementation of the library. > > Thank you very much for your answer, > And I wish you all fantastic time within friends and family for the end of > the year. > > Best Regards. > > *Gildas Quéméner* -- Daniel Kulp [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> - http://dankulp.com/blog <http://dankulp.com/blog> Talend Community Coder - http://talend.com <http://coders.talend.com/>
