Hello, Andi Gutmans wrote: > > Hey, > > The Zend Engine 2 has made lots of progress. > I think we should have a discussion of what other things besides the > scripting engine we'd like to change for PHP 5. > I know there was talk on deprecating some stuff such as old-style function > names, moving extensions to PECL etc.. I think it's a good time to start > discussing some of these issues (hopefully we can keep things short :) > Also, let's try and keep the scope to realistic changes which won't turn > PHP upside down and which are doable within a relatively short period of > time. I think it'd be really cool if we could get an alpha of PHP 5 out by > Spring.
One thing that I think it is really vital to prevent PHP to leak even more users to other languages is to have built-in support for consuming Web services. Why is this vital? Because Microsoft and other companies have been working hard to making this built-in feature on the languages that they support. So, now it is easy to point a program in such languages to a WSDL file URL and the language makes the Web services interface automatically available to the program as it it was accessing the methods of a local class. If PHP does not make this as easy, we'll see a lot of people leaving PHP for those other languages. Why built-in support (and not some local user classes)? Because the definition of the interface such Web services depends on the remote server. There seems to not be a way to add an interface dynamically to PHP, except for dynamically generating code for a class file and loading it afterwards. It would work, but it would not as fast as it could and it would not be a assumed as a built-in feature of PHP that users could rely on its official support. Why SOAP (and not XML-RPC for instance)? The technical merits of the protocols are not very relevant in this circumstance. The truth is that Microsoft and other companies have been pushing very hard for SOAP based Web services. We are already seeing a lot of SOAP based services that will never be available through XML-RPC because their authors only have tools to create Web services via SOAP and not XML-RPC. Insisting on XML-RPC just to be against Microsoft and their friends would be counterproductive that is not what people that want to consume such Web services need. Supporting both XML-RPC and SOAP would be nicer but probably with little advantage in the end for the majority Web service consumers. PHP already has built-in XML-RPC support that Sterling added. So how would I see this SOAP based Web services work conviniently: - A PHP function would take an URL for a WDSL file and dynamically added a class that exposes public functions that when called would invoke the remote Web services. - The PHP user could either create an object of that class or extend it with subclass. This way he could override the default methods for error handling, logging and authentication. I don't think it is soon to add built-in support for Web services in PHP, but I am afraid the later it is added, the more users will give up on PHP for other languages with such support. Regards, Manuel Lemos -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
