Tag: PHP

bookmark_borderCardDAV: What is Turba’s true data model?

Posted on by Ralf

Turba Addressbook imports, exports and syncs to and from many formats. I discussed all the formats in a previous article.

You can even customize the addressbooks, make them contain extra fields or omit common fields. Saving and loading data from the addressbook backend is in some way one more such conversion. Turba can actually read and write to SQL and LDAP backends, to the Preferences System and to an outdated version of the Kolab Groupware Server and IMSP Servers. It can derive Addressbooks from Horde Groups, Favourite Recipients (usually from IMP) and stored search queries (virtual addressbooks).

This diversity of backends and configuration options comes at a cost. It is sometimes not clear what is the data model and who owns the data. This complicates synchronisation scenarios like CardDAV.

Let’s look at this in detail. LDAP backends might be considered the owner of data and Turba would be just a view to that data or a client with edit permissions. LDAP would be able to change data, add new contacts, delete contacts or change contact details without turba even knowing. This is less of a problem with the SQL driver as the SQL schema of Turba should never be consumed directly, rather through turba’s API or exchange formats. Groups are a primary culprit of not telling Turba any changes.

On the other hand, sync protocols may contain data the current turba configuration or backend does not recognize. CardDAV and its data format vCard may contain a wealth of properties and allow custom extensions fields. CardDAV servers are supposed not to simply drop/forget fields they do not recognize because that could make the client forget fields in the data it actually supports. On the other hand, a client may send an update of a contact missing a property which is stored in a previous version of the contact. We need to understand if the client simply cannot handle that property or if it is supposed to remove that property. Well-behaved clients should not strip properties they do not understand and well-behaved servers should not do that either.

Turba may support contact information which cannot be mapped to CardDAV/vCard but I am currently unaware of any. As vCard allows custom fields, at the moment I consider vCard the lingua franca.

Another tough scenario are references to other contacts or resources. CardDAV/vCard support multiple ways to indicate these and the backend may support a completely different model of referencing. How should we react on references to contacts which we do not (yet) have? Many of these problems also affect CalDAV sync in the kronolith calendar and nag tasks app.

I am ignoring ActiveSync and SyncML because I do no longer possess any syncml capable device and I have limited understanding of the ActiveSync code. It seems to have a static mapping between turba internal field names and ActiveSync field names.

To resolve all these issues, Turba needs to have its own data model and it needs to store synced data its backend is not interested in. It must not lose or forget any information when syncing back to the client. This is currently not the case.

bookmark_borderHorde’s HTTP component goes PSR

Posted on by Ralf

This weekend, I gave the horde/http component a some major redesign. See how things escalated. Oh my.
My minimum goals were namespacing, PSR-4 (Revised Autoloading Standard) and some minor, schematic adjustments. The final result is quite different. I ended up implementing PSR-7 (HTTP Message Interface), PSR-17 (HTTP Factories) and PSR-18 (HTTP Client). The code largely complies with PSR-12 (Extended Coding Style Guide) and thus, implicitly, PSR-1 (Basic Coding Standard). I am sure you will find some deviations and issues, so I welcome any Pull Requests against my repo. You will find the new code in /src/. The original, incompatible implementation is untouched and resides in /lib/. They can coexist as they are so different (namespaced vs unnamespaced, among others).

This is not a total rewrite. I could leverage most of the existing code base with some tweaks. This work would not exist without the foundation by Chuck Hagenbuch and all the contributions from the different Horde maintainers over the years. You will also notice similarities to other php PSR-7/18 implementations out there. I checked out Guzzle, httplug/php-http and some others. It was a great learning experience and I will not pretend I am not influenced by it.

As with all my modernisation activities, I made use of features allowed by PHP 7.4. This excludes Constructor Property Promotion and, sadly, Union Types as both are PHP 8. Union Types have been relegated to phpdoc annotations or check methods. Please mind most of the PSR’s target compatibility with PHP releases older than PHP 7.4 and thus do not sport return types or scalar type hints. I followed these signatures where applicable.

One major change between the old codebase and the new one is clients and Request/Response classes.
In the old implementation, there would be one client but different Request/Response implementations using different backing technologies like pecl/http, fopen or curl. The new implementation moves transport code to clients implementing PSR-18. Optionally, they can be wrapped by a Horde\Http\HordeClientWrapper which exposes the PSR-18 itself, but otherwise mimics the old Horde_Http_Client class.

Horde/http is used by very different parts of Horde, including the horde/dav adapter to SabreDAV, various service integrations (Gravatar, Twitter, …), the horde/feed library and application code all over the place. I intend to upgrade those use cases to the new implementation. I am looking forward to criticism or acceptance of that approach.

The goal of this project is more far-reaching. While Horde 4 and Horde 5 already had horde/controller, they made very limited use of it. In my non-public projects, I relied heavily on controllers and I made several attempts at improving the way controllers are set up in horde/core. However, I always felt the results were clunky and not really what I wished to achieve. While horde/controller knows prefilters and postfilters, these are not easy to use and there are few examples. While doing research, I made up my mind. I want to replace Controller/Prefilter/Postfilter with their PSR-15 (HTTP Handlers and Middleware) equivalents. Controllers will be Handlers, Pre/Postfilters will be Middlewares. Together they will be stacks. Authentication, Authorization, Logging etc will be relegated to Middlewares. There will be a default stack to mimic the default controller behaviour in Horde 5 (Be authenticated or be relegated to the login page). You will be able to define application-specific default stacks or request-specific stacks. As Middlewares are a public standard, we might be able to leverage middlewares existing out in the wild or attract microframework users to some horde built middlewares. I want to make it easier for coders to build horde apps without relearning everything they needed to learn for laravel, laminas or symfony. I also want to make it easier for everyone to cooperate. Horde is among the oldest framework vendors, predating most of PEAR and Zend. I think we still have some bits to offer.

Missing Bits:

  • While I did some implementation of UploadedFileInterface, it is still quite basic
  • UploadedFileFactoryInterface is missing as I have not yet built the server side use cases
  • Unit Tests need to be adapted to the new code base. Is there some PSR Acid Test out there?
  • I began implementing the ext-http (PECL_HTTP) backend but stopped as I am unsure about it. That extension is in version 4 now and still services version 3, but we have backends for versions 1 and 2. I need to learn more about it and decice if it makes sense to invest into that aspect.

bookmark_borderHorde/Rdo ORM: PSR-4 and BC Breaks

Posted on by Ralf

Summary: Horde/Rdo ORM got upgraded for Namespaces. User code conversion is straight-forward. Backward Compatibility is limited.

If you ever wondered, RDO stands for Rampage Data Objects. This has been on my list for quite long, but it took some time to get it right. The horde/rdo library is horde’s Object Relational Mapping (ORM) solution. It allows you to store objects into sql databases or retrieve them without writing SQL. Originally, it has been written by Chuck Hagenbuch way back in the PHP 4 days and I have been a heavy user for years. If you know Laravel’s Eloquent, Doctrine, Hibernate, ActiveRecord, nHydrate or Dapper, this one is Chuck’s “as light as possible” implementation of the concept. Colleagues from B1 Systems have been users and contributors over the years. However, it has long been time to rethink Rdo in the light of newer capabilities of PHP 7.4 or even PHP 8. This time is now.

But you should not fear upgrading. First, the library still keeps the unnamespaced PSR-0 code, at least for the time being. Second, there is a straight-forward upgrade path for existing users.

Horde_Rdo_Base -> Horde\Rdo\Base
Horde_Rdo_Mapper -> Horde\Rdo\BaseMapper
Horde_Rdo_Factory -> Horde\Rdo\Factory
Horde_Rdo_List -> Horde\Rdo\DefaultList
Horde_Rdo_Iterator -> Horde\Rdo\DefaultIterator
Horde_Rdo_Query -> Horde\Rdo\DefaultQuery
Horde_Rdo_Exception -> Horde\Rdo\RdoException
Horde_Rdo:: -> Horde\Rdo\Constants::

It’s about as easy as it looks. Converting an application took me a few minutes. You might have noticed the names do not exactly match. Some names were not practical to simply turn into namespaced classes. In other cases, I turned class names into interface names. I found myself implementing the same enhancements over and over in multiple projects and I found myself wishing there was an easy way to do some others.

Less Boilerplate Mappers and Entities

Rdo is much more fun than some other ORMs as it comes with very little configuration. The library autodetects properties from the table columns. Datetime fields are automatically cast to Horde_Date objects. By default, Rdo tries for a convention over configuration approach for mapping table names, mappers, entities etc. Unfortunately, for most of my projects, that default does not fit too well to the class structure and file layout I choose. But still, implementing a new pair of mappers and entities takes two files and only two or three settings I ever need to think about.

Most often, subclassing the base mapper and the base entity is the right thing to do. But sometimes, you do not really care. If all you ever do to your entity is call ->toArray() and serialize it to json, you would be served very well by a generic entity instead. This is something on my list. I would even go one step further: If all you are changing to a mapper is subclassing and telling it the name of its database table and entity class, why subclass at all? Yes, I would want to turn the optional Factory class into something smarter. It will give you your mapper, be it an instance of the generic mapper with the right table name or something very customized.

Custom List Objects

Rdo queries always return a Horde\Rdo\List. This is a good default implementation and it makes common tasks easy. However, there are situations where you want your list of entities to be specific to an entity type or maybe a subclass of some base list class completely external to Rdo. Maybe you want to manipulate a list or merge results from two different queries.

Custom Entities
Sometimes the default entity implementation does not serve you well. There’s a range of things you would want.
– You want to inherit from a base class to attach behavior to your data. So you attach an interface and a trait to that foreign class to make it Rdo aware.
– You want to implement your own behaviour altogether
– You want Rdo to implement a proper repository with strongly encapsulated, less chatty domain objects. Rdo should provide a mechanism to produce those objects for you rather than having you cast or wrap Rdo\Base objects into your actual models. But it should not force you to think about such concepts before you really need them.

NoSql backends
Remember the name Rampage Data Objects? Rdo is mostly about mapping data to objects. It’s not about autogenerating the smartest SQL for the most obscure use cases. But once you have your prototype version ready, your first feedback comes in, you think about new features – and suddenly you want to support a new backend for some of your domain objects. Be it a NoSql database, a key/value store, a limited scope within a directory like LDAP or even a REST service. In a traditional horde application, you would wrap Rdo into a Driver called Driver/Rdo or Driver/Sql and implement a different backend. But what if you do not want to flip all your data to the new backend? Only the shopping list should go to the nosql backend but not the customers or the product inventory? You end up implementing individual drivers with individual backends. But you used Rdo’s relations feature … things get messy.

To achieve these capabilities, I want to make the Mapper less dominant. The formerly optional Factory gets promoted to take care of managing the right mappers, entities, backends, list types. This is what these interfaces are for. Mappers should mostly take care of mapping between an object class and a plain data format. Currently the mapper and query do too much, tightly coupled with the single mandatory list type. This will change.

Rampage Data Objects provides out of the box defaults for easy and common use cases. It gets you started really quick. We will add the capabilities needed when your application is maturing and your use cases get more demanding. This will be fun.

Backward Compatibility Breaks
The Horde\Rdo\Base* classes and their return types will be your best bet for backward compatibility. If you don’t try to use entities and mappers for side effects, you will be very safe. Factory’s constructor will change very soon. Factory should best be created from a Dependency Injector. Mappers should be created from Factory.

You should not rely on mappers exposing adapter or factory for creating other objects. Also, trying to manipulate sql session modes or transactions through Rdo’s adapter is not a good idea.

bookmark_borderWhy extending PHPUnit might be wrong

Posted on by Ralf

Over the last few months, I spent a lot of cold winter evening hours looking into porting ancient PHPUnit 4.x test suites over to PHPUnit 9.x. The test suites, you guessed it, belong to the Horde framework. Horde actually does not just use phpunit but wraps it into its own testing library horde/test. The full details are explained on the wiki. Horde provides multiple ways to actually run the unit tests, either through its components helper or through AllTests.php or through calling individual tests with phpunit. While horde/test adds value and allows simplifying some test scenarios, it also has its own problems.

I’m not saying it didn’t make sense back when this was built. The original alpha release of horde/test dates back to 2011. PHP 5.4 was not yet released, composer would see its initial release in 2012, PEAR was slowly getting old and PEAR2 was not yet officially a dead cow. It was a totally different ecosystem back then. However, times have changed.

As of 2021, phpunit has evolved into a relatively fast moving target and while its primary author Sebastian Bergmann does not break backward compatibility for the sake of it, he is not shy of doing it either. Some parts of phpunit which are relevant for integration may become unavailable in the next major release. Some of PHPUnit’s core classes are clearly marked as internal.

The Horde Test library adds some mandatory boilerplate to phpunit: Each library and app has its own mandatory bootstrap.php file calling into the test library’s bootstrap class and may have an additional autoload file. Also, a test suite should come with an AllTests.php file calling into the test package’s AllTests class and in turn using Horde_Test_AllTests_TestRunner – which extends PHPUnit\Runner\BaseTestRunner but wait…

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/blob/9.5/src/Runner/BaseTestRunner.php

/**
 * @internal This class is not covered by the backward compatibility promise for PHPUnit
 */
abstract class BaseTestRunner

Trouble ahead, maybe. I am not joking. The master branch which will become PHPUnit 10 does not even have that file. We can find a solution for that, sure. But maybe we should not. As of 2021, the horde/test suite contains valuable helpers and extensions to PHPUnit, but none of these really need to hook into phpunit’s core that deep anymore.

Let’s look into different issues covered by that code.

Autoloading and dependency setup

Back in 2011 it made sense to have some glue which combines autoloading with Horde’s and PEAR’s notions of how things should be organized in a file system. That is no longer a core concern. Everybody and his dog use composer and composer’s autoloader and either do PSR-0 or PSR-4 autoloading schemes. Horde 6 will be delivered via composer, does – optionally, partially – break with some older ideas of organisation, brings some PSR-4 code and a lot of PSR-0 code. In short, there is very limited need for a custom autoloading scheme. The test suite should just rely on some autoloading being setup, by whoever or whatever. It should not address this concern beyond the means already provided by phpunit itself. Code should be accessed through checking if class names are either present or loadable, not by assuming some files are in some location. Of course, this is a little simplified – at its core, all autoloading depends on something being in some wellknown location. We should simply rely on the default solution until it is not possible for a specific case – and then address that. Even if we accept the notion of a vendor dir and an autoload file in vendor/autoload.php, we could provision it via horde/components or horde/git-tools or some horde/test utility for the rare cases where just using composer would not be appropriate.

Setting up complex test cases

Tests are supposed to be simple. They should focus on one unit under test and keep as much of the ecosystem as possible out of the picture. Dependencies should be stubbed or mocked. Databases and I/O, especially network traffic, should be substituted. A majority of test cases should be modeled with just the library’s own code and PHPUnit’s mocking facilities, maybe depending on some interfaces from some dependency.

But sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes the unit under test actually IS code interfacing with databases and their subtle differences. Sometimes the code needs to interact with a non-trivial amount of configuration and dependencies. Especially code which interacts with the framework’s core services or which couples the application’s subsystems may not be easy to mock. It makes sense to provide a simplified pretend environment for such test subjects. But that should be opt-in on a case by case basis. It should not be a mandatory tie-in of additional code and boilerplate for even the most trivial test cases.

Integration with tools

horde/components and some other tools wrap phpunit and other utilities. But as the ecosystem changes, the benefits are shrinking. Github Actions and Gitlab CI have become popular platforms with many ready-made CI tools available to use. It is no longer necessary to run your own Hudson or Jenkins and build your own automation frameworks. While it is still nice to have a short way to run a test suite including dead code and copy/paste detection, coding style fixers etc without the need to check anything into the SCM or even create a commit, there’s little incentive for maintaining a deep integration into your own runtime code. In the end, all testing and quality assurance automation aims to make you deliver safe, stable code as fast as possible. Spending ours writing automated tests makes sense and may safe you from hours of debugging and frustration. Spending hours writing or fixing a deep integration into some test tool which simply does not want to be integrated? Less so. It should be kept to a minimum. There’s a reason why the preferred delivery of some of these tools is not composer but phar.

What can you do?

So what would a new test toolchain look like? Unit tests and even integration tests should rely on a default, external autoloading solution. In the absense of configuration, this should be vendor/autoload.php, however it is delivered.
Unit tests should by default just run off PHPUnit and the library’s code. Maybe it makes sense to provide the most widespread interfaces without actually having to install their backing code. Why not, as long as it does not create manual effort. Any framework-specific recurring need should be addressed by opt-in code provided as traits or helper classes, available through default development-time autoloading sources. Fringe tests relying on specific infrastructure should skip without failing. Configurable tests should run out of the box in a useful default configuration if it makes sense. These changes can be created in an incremental, opt-in fashion with very limited BC breaks. This is good as nobody has time to waste on large scale transformation. Remember, it’s all about your code, the tests are just a useful tool.

bookmark_borderPEAR down – Taking Horde to Composer

Posted on by Ralf

Since Horde 4, the Horde ecosystem heavily relied on the PEAR infrastructure. Sadly, this infrastructure is in bad health. It’s time to add alternatives.

Everybody has noticed the recent PEAR break-in.

A security breach has been found on the http://pear.php.net webserver, with a tainted go-pear.phar discovered. The PEAR website itself has been disabled until a known clean site can be rebuilt. A more detailed announcement will be on the PEAR Blog once it’s back online. If you have downloaded this go-pear.phar in the past six months, you should get a new copy of the same release version from GitHub (pear/pearweb_phars) and compare file hashes. If different, you may have the infected file.

While I am writing these lines, pear.php.net is down. Retrieval links for individual pear packages are down. Installation of pear packages is still possible from private mirrors or linux software distribution packages (openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu). Separate pear servers like pear.horde.org are not directly affected. However, a lot of pear software relies on one or many libraries from pear.php.net – it’s a tough situation. A lot of software projects have moved on to composer, an alternative solution to dependency distribution. However, some composer projects have dependency on PEAR channels.

I am currently submitting some changes to Horde upstream to make Horde libs (both released and from git) more usable from composer projects.
Short-term goal is making use of some highlight libraries easier in other contexts. For example, Horde_ActiveSync and Horde_Mail, Horde_Smtp, Horde_Imap_Client are really shiny. I use Horde_Date so much I even introduced it in some non-horde software – even though most functionality is also somewhere in php native classes.

The ultimate goal however is to enable horde groupware installations out of composer. This requires more work to be done. There are several issues.

  • The db migration tool checks for some pear path settings during runtime https://github.com/horde/Core/pull/2 Most likely there are other code paths which need to be addressed.
  • Horde Libraries should not be web readable but horde apps should be in a web accessible structure. Traditionally, they are installed below the base application (“horde dir”) but they can also be installed to separate dirs.
  • Some libraries like Horde_Core contain files like javascript packages which need to be moved or linked to a location inside another package. Traditionally, this is handled either by the “git-tools” tool linking the code directory to a separate web directory or by pear placing various parts of the package to different root paths. Composer doesn’t have that out of the box.

Horde already has been generating composer manifest files for quite a while. Unfortunately, they were thin wrappers around the existing pear channel. The original generator even took all package information from the pear manifest file (package.xml) and converted it. Which means, it relied on a working pear installation. I wrote an alternative implementation which directly converts from .horde.yml to composer.json – Calling the packages by their composer-native names. As horde packages have not been released on packagist yet, the composer manifest also includes repository links to the relevant git repository. This should later be disabled for releases and only turned on in master/head scenarios. Releases should be pulled from packagist authority, which is much faster and less reliant on existing repository layouts. https://github.com/horde/components/pull/3

To address the open points, composer needs to be amended. I currently generate the manifests using package types “horde-library” and “horde-application” – I also added a package type “horde-theme” for which no precedent exists yet. Composer doesn’t understand these types unless one adds an installer plugin https://github.com/maintaina-com/installers. Once completed and accepted, this should be upstreamed into composer/installers. The plugin currently handles installing apps to appropriate places rather than /vendor/ – however, I think we should avoid having a super-special case “horde-base” and default to installing apps directly below the project dir. Horde base should also live on the same hierarchy. This needs some additional tools and autoconfiguration to make it convenient. Still much way to go.

That said, I don’t think pear support should be dropped anytime soon. It’s the most sensible way for distribution packaging php software. As long as we can bear the cost involved in keeping it up, we should try.

bookmark_borderhorde trustr – A new horde CA app step by step

Posted on by Ralf

Trustr is my current project to create a simple certificate management app.
I decided that it is just about the right scope to demonstrate a few things about application development in Horde 5.

I have not made any research if the name is already occupied by some other software. Should any problems arise, please contact me and we will find a good solution. I just wanted to start without losing much time on unrelated issues.

My goals as of now:

– Keep everything neat, testable, fairly decoupled and reusable. The core logic should be exportable to a separate library without much change. There won’t be any class of static shortcut methods pulling stuff out of nowhere. Config and registry are only accessed at select points, never in the deeper layers.
– Provide a CLI using Horde_Cli and Horde_Cli_Application (modeled after the backup tool in horde base git)
– Store to relational database using Horde_Db and Horde_Rdo for abstraction
– Use php openssl extension for certificate actions, but design with future options in mind
– Rely on magic openssl defaults as little as possible
– Use conf.xml / conf.php for any global defaults
– Show how to use the inter-app API (reusable for xml-rpc and json-rpc)
– Showcase an approach to REST danabol ds in Horde (experimental)

The app is intended as a resource provider. The UI is NOT a top priority. However, I am currently toying around with a Flux-like design in some unrelated larger project and I may or may not try some ideas later on.

Initial Steps: Creating the working environment

I set up a new horde development container using the horde tumbleweed image from Open Build Service and a docker compose file from my colleague Florian Frank. Please mind both are WIP and improve-as-needed projects.


git clone https://github.com/FrankFlorian/hordeOnTumbelweed.git
cd hordeOnTumbelweed
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml up


This yields a running horde instance on localhost and a database container.
I needed to perform a little manual setup in the web admin ui to get the DB to run and create all default horde schemas.

Next I entered the developer container with a shell
docker exec -it hordeOnTumbelWeed_php_1 bash

There are other ways to work with a container but that’s what I did.

 

Creating a  skeleton app

The container comes with a fairly complete horde git checkout in /srv/git/horde and a clone of the horde git tools in /srv/git/git-tools

A new skeleton app can be created using

horde-git-tools dev new --author "Ralf Lang <lastname@b1-systems.de>" --app-name trustr

The new app needs to be linked to the web directory using

horde-git-tools dev install

Also, a registry entry needs to be created by putting a little file into /srv/git/horde/base/config/registry.d

cat trustr-registry.d.php

<?php
// Copy this example snipped to horde/registry.d
$this->applications['trustr'] = array(
'name' => _('Certificates'),
'provides' => array('certificates')
);

 

This makes the new app show up in the admin menu. To actually use it and make it appear in topbar, you also need to go to /admin/config and create the config file for this app. Even though the settings don’t actually mean anything by now, the file must be present.

I hope to follow up soon with articles on the architecture and sub systems of the little app.

bookmark_borderSara Golemon (Facebook) announces PHP Language Specification for OSCON 2014

Posted on by Ralf

For more than 10 years, PHP core developers repeatedly raised the topic of providing a formal language specification for PHP. Now a team of facebook employees has written such a specification. The spec document is currently only available as a preview chapter a preview chapter . PHP veteran Sara Golemon announced on the “PHP internals” list that the full document will be ready for O’Reilly’s OSCON 2014. Sara Golemon published the standard book on “Extending and Embedding PHP” some years ago and now works for Facebook’s own PHP implementation HHVM. The PHP spec defines PHP version 5.6 in about 200 pages and contains all the odd and obscure quirks of the language core. Facebook’s own HHVM aims to be as close to the spec as possible. Currently, PHP developers discuss how amending the spec can become a mandatory part of the language development process. Though some are sceptic that all developers will embrace the change in the process, everybody on the list was happy to have the new document.

Software Architect Stas Malyshev:

Thank you Sara and Facebook team for doing something we’ve been talking
about for more than a decade and before that nobody actually attempting
to do. I think it is a great development and I hope to see the first
version soon.

http://dl.hhvm.com/resources/PHPSpec-SneakPeak.pdf

bookmark_borderSara Golemon (Facebook) kündigt PHP Language Specification auf OSCON 2014 an

Posted on by Ralf

Seit über 10 Jahren bringen immer wieder einige der PHP-Sprachentwickler den Plan an, eine formale Spezifikation für den Sprachkern bereitzustellen. Ein Team bei Facebook hat das nun getan. Die Spezifikation, die bisher nur als Vorschau vorliegt, wurde von Sara Golemon auf der Entwickler-Liste angekündigt und soll auf der OSCON 2014 vorgestellt werden. Sara Golemon veröffentlichte schon vor einigen Jahren ein Standardwerk über die Entwicklung von PHP-Erweiterungsmodulen und arbeitet mittlerweile an Facebooks eigener PHP-Version HHVM.

Das rund 200 Seiten starke Dokument orientiert sich an der PHP-Version 5.6 und enthält auch obskure Verhaltensweisen des PHP-Sprachkerns in seltenen Randfällen. Die Facebook-eigene PHP-Version HHVM soll sich möglichst eng an diese Vorgaben halten.

Die PHP-Community berät derzeit, wie sie die Fortschreibung der Spezifikation in den Entwicklungsprozess einbinden kann. Die Ankündigung wurde mit viel Begeisterung aufgenommen.

Software-Architekt Stas Malyshev:

Thank you Sara and Facebook team for doing something we’ve been talking
about for more than a decade and before that nobody actually attempting
to do. I think it is a great development and I hope to see the first
version soon.

http://dl.hhvm.com/resources/PHPSpec-SneakPeak.pdf

bookmark_borderI managed to bring large file uploads into PHP 5.6

Posted on by Ralf

A colleague of mine recently faced difficulties to upload large opensource DVD images (>4G) into ownCloud during a demonstration. After some analysis, it turned out that it wasn’t ownCloud’s fault at all: PHP itself simply could not cope with large file uploads due to an overflow in some key variables. Further research showed that this had been known since 2008 under the bug number #44522. There was even a half completed patch available. I decided to pick up the existing patch and comments from developers and critics and port it to recent PHP, also making some changes to data type definitions. After a discussion on the PHP list, it turned out that this patch cannot be shipped for any upstream PHP before the next release (PHP 5.6) due to backwards compatibility. SUSE Enterprise Linux and openSUSE ship a similar patch with their PHP packages though. Finally, Michael Wallner order kopen clomid 100mg met nederland verzending added tests and included the patch into the PHP master branch.

There only has been very basic testing for Windows and other non-linux PHP ports yet but there is still some time to do this before PHP 5.6 gets released.
cenforce 200 mg te koop

bookmark_borderHeads Up: PHP deprecates mysql extension in 5.5.

Posted on by Ralf

In a recent developer vote, the php project decided to deprecate the mysql extension in PHP 5.5 and finally remove it from the main PHP project. It may or may not be available for a longer period as a PECL extension.

The mysql extension has long been superseded by two more powerful extensions, PDO/Mysql and mysqli (improved). For years, the older extension has not received any new features and the developers kept it around just to keep compatibility with old code. Framework and application developers are now urged to update their code to use one of the alternative mysql APIs. There are a lot of old code snippets and tutorials around which describe the old API. Eventually, this code will begin to throw warnings and finally stop to work.

Developers discussed the impact of this move on end users. While it might be shocking to see hordes of old installations break just because the hoster updates his PHP version, there is no need to panic. Most hosters have not clenbuterol hydroklorid clen kjope even upgraded to the recent PHP 5.4 release and it might be years to go until PHP 5.6 finally hits enterprise distributions like SLES or RHEL. Additionally, distributors and hosters might opt to provide the PECL version of the mysql extension for backward compatibility. There is enough time left for developers and end users to react on the coming change.

More on the deprecation vote