Hey Glen,
I'll take some time to respond how I think things are going, and I
can probably address a few of your suggestions inline below.
1. Support for PHP namespaces.
- Obviously, this can only happen after 5.3, and would probably not be
backward compatible.
- This is not a high priority, but still a nice feature to have to keep ZF
'on the cutting edge'.
One issue is gonna be the min. requirements for php. Since ZF is
sticking to 5.1.4+, namespaces would not be supported until the minimum
requirements have been raised.
That said, its worth mentioning that the existing coding standard uses a
pseudo-namespace and moving into the direction of php's native
namespaces will be easy to move to.. whenever its decided to move in
that direction.
Another consideration is letting namespaces take root in the community
and having some "namespace" best practices emerge before jumping into
them immediately.
2. Add Zend_Loader::addDirectory(string) and
Zend_Loader::addDirectories(string ...)
- This will allow you to add directories that are searched in when using
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload().
- loadClass() and loadFile() will also make use of these locations (not sure
if the $dirs parameters should be removed or not).
Have a look at whats in the incubator, after seeing a repeated pattern
in a few different components doing essentially the same thing, I
proofed out what is called Zend_Loader_PluginLoader. This basically is
the foundation for building Pluggable Architectures. Essentially, this
allows the loading of non-include path code, at a specific prefixed
namespace. Examples of this functionality can already been seen in the
action helpers and view helpers.
While it might not directly answer your question, its still worth a look.
This also would be the foundations for having an action helper like a
"ModelLoader".
4. Zend_Controller_Front should have a setModuleDirectory() function in
addition to the addModuleDirectory() function (as with
set/addControllerDirectory()).
Matthew would be better equipped to answer this one ;)
-ralph
