Following on from my RFC about an interface mechanism, what we really need is some brainstorming on what interfaces we need or would like to have in PHP. I'm aiming at PHP 5.
The following concepts have already been mentioned either by myself or others as being something we'd like to see in PHP: DOM XML nodes/documents ---> XSLT processor. Image Handle --> PDF, SWF or some other extension with image embedding/processing. Socket / Network "behaviours" for streams. Memory Buffer accessors for streams (direct access to memory streams buffers, or access to file contents via mmap or some other mechanism). What we need is to have the specifics worked out; the last few items are relatively easy, but for something like XML we need to think about sticking to a common subset of features that we can rely on, and therefore a common set of methods that we would need in our interfaces. Perhaps we might need 2 or 3 (or more) interfaces to properly deal with XML based resources. If you have any other ideas where an interface would be useful, even if you think it sounds silly, post it here. If you've ever thought "it would be great if I could use an XXX resource in the YYY extension functions", then we could implement that behaviour using interfaces. Remember, these interfaces are intended to be used in the C extension code, not for PHP scripts, so please don't get them confused! I know that some of this functionality can be handled in user-space by using some kind of wrapper scripts or libraries, but it would be extremely useful for PHP to do some of these nice things without relying on glue scripts. Why am I making so much noise about this? A couple of recent threads, despite degenerating into madness, have raised a few good points about how PHP could evolve to become even better than it is now. I see the interface idea as one method for this kind of improvement. --Wez. -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
