On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 1:17 PM, Michael Wallner <m...@php.net> wrote:
> Hi, > > Discussion has been very low on this topic since it was proposed on > August 19th, so I just opened the vote on the RFC whether to add > pecl_http to the core. The vote will be open until about 12:00 UTC on > Friday, February 6th. > > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/pecl_http#vote > > Great debate in here. I did read all the answers and I agree with many. My opinions summed-up : - PHP is a web language, and if there is one thing that must be done right, it's to provide a rich-efficient-easy-to-extend HTTP API to our users, which with our actual stream wrappers, is not really the case. - Why not use Curl ? I fully agree with Stas message here : Curl is the open-source defacto library you bind against when you want to manage HTTP messages (and many other layer-7 formats). Many many opensource projects already binds it. Curl is rich, stable, opensource; cross platform, efficient and supported by many companies. To answer Andrea : our HTTP stream wrapper layer used to be able to use curl wrappers, we dropped such a support in 5.6 AFAIR, because it was beeing experimental for years, and nobody maintained this. * In addition to that : Curl is actively working on the next HTTP2 standard. If we, PHP, were using it, we would immediately be compatible with HTTP2 when it is released, without much effort. - pecl_http is rich. I'm not saying I'd have vote +1 to it, but from the very first start I used PHP, about 10y ago, I've always wondered why pecl_http wasn't a core de-facto extension. Just try to play with HTTP negociation or HTTP partial messages with vanilla PHP (without pecl_http) and you'll see what PITA it is. Look at Java interfaces (example : https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/servletapi/javax/servlet/http/package-summary.html), they are not perfect, but they are clean, clear, OOP designed APIS. PHP current HTTP API just makes me scared. - And finally, probably the most important thing => I'm all +1 with Andrea , saying that we have way too many places into PHP source code where HTTP has been yet-once-again reimplemented. This is WRONG from a software development POV. Easy as this. Have a look at ext/SAOP, at php-fpm, at PHP streams .... So many duplicated code about handling HTTP. We suffer from that (bug fixed in one place but not the other one). We absolutely need to design a low level HTTP API at one unique place (ext/standard?) and reuse it everywhere as well as provide userland access to it, like we've done for so many dfferent things so far, but HTTP .... Julien.Pauli
