I'm including gettext library in my application. But, as our team decided to go with native php gettext. The gettext library accepts the string and converts it using the "Translate" function which is defined in the library. Now how can I shift suddenly to native lib? Is it only for performance? Any suggestions on using native lib. Thanks in advance.
It is mainly for performance and well as ease of use.
When you use an external library inside PHP using system() for e.g., then the pros are that you will be able to use ALL of its options, which will make you a power user. The cons are that, each time you run it, you have to do like a parsing of the return string and then figure out the results and stuff, which is a hassle and pretty error prone.
When you use a language-binding of the external library, then cons are that you are confined to the API calls that the binding provides. The pros are that the return values, the error status etc will be well defined within the API calls so handling the calls will be easier.
This is usually a tradeoff and it will vary from case to case as to whether one should use native interfaces or just execute the library directly.
Related
It's evident that the cURL functions are very widely used. But why is that? Is it really only because the extension is mostly enabled per default?
While I can certainly relate to not introducing 3rd party libraries over builtins (DOMDocument vs phpQuery), using curl appears somewhat odd to me. There are heaps of HTTP libraries like Zend_Http or PEAR Http_Request. And despite my disdain for needless object-oriented interfaces, the pull-parameter-procedural API of curl strikes me as less legible in comparison.
There is of course a reason for that. But I'm wondering if most PHP developers realize what else libcurl can actually be used for, and that it's not just a HTTP library?
Do you have examples or actual code which utilizes cURL for <any other things> it was made for?
Or if you just use it for HTTP, what are the reasons. Why are real PHP HTTP libraries seemingly avoided nowadays?
I think this would be related to why do people use the mysql functions instead of mysqli (more object oriented interface) or take a step further and use a data abstraction layer or PDOs.
HTTP_Request2 says that there is a cURL adapter available to wrap around PHP's cURL functions.
Personally a lot of the PEAR extensions I have tried out, I haven't been that impressed with (and I feel less confident with PEAR libraries that are sitting in alpha that haven't been updated in a long time). Whereas the HTTP_Request2 Library does look quite nice
I for one would have used cURL without thinking of looking at a possible PEAR library to use. So thanks for raising my awareness.
The libraries you mentioned aren't default, and from my experience in PHP, I prefer to use less of such libraries; they enable a broader attack surface, decrease reliability, open to future modification/deprecation more than PHP itself.
Then, there's the sockets functionality which, although I've used some times, I prefer to rely on a higher level approach whenever possible.
What have I used CURL for?
As some may know, I'm currently working on a PHP framework. The communication core extension (appropriately called "connect") makes use of CURL as it's base.
I've used it widely, from extracting favicons form websites (together with parser utilities and stuff) to standard API calls over HTTP as well as the FTP layer when PHP's FTP is disabled (through stream wrappers) - and we all know native PHP FTP ain't that reliable.
Functional reasons as mentioned in the comments:
It's very old, [widely used and] well tested code, works reliably
is usually enabled by default
allows very fine grained control over the details of the request.
This might need expanding. By nature of the common-denominator protocol API cURL might provide features that plain HTTP libraries in PHP can't...
Historic reasons:
curl used to be the only thing that could handle cookies, POST, file uploads...
A lot of curl use probably comes from tutorials that pre-date PHP 5.
I'd like to be able to run JavaScript and get the results with PHP and is wondering if there is a library for PHP that allows me to parse it out. My first thought was to use node.js, but since node.js has access to sockets, files and things I think I'd prefer to avoid that.
Rationale: I'm doing screen scraping in PHP and have encountered many scenarios where the data is being produced by JavaScript on the frontend, and I would like to avoid writing specialized filtering functions to act on the JavaScript on a per-case basis since that takes a lot of time. The more general case would be to parse the JavaScript directly.
Downvoting: I don't really see what's so controversial about this question, modern web crawlers are known to do it, the only difference is that they tend to not be written in PHP. [1]
[1] http://blogs.forbes.com/velocity/2010/06/25/google-isnt-just-reading-your-links-its-now-running-your-code/
It's an interesting question and the down-voters are being unimaginative about potential use-cases. Page archiving tools, printing scripts, preview images - all valid reasons to want to manipulate a document with the JavaScript included within the page.
I'm not aware of any existing PHP implementations, but you could probably adapt Mozilla's SpiderMonkey as a PHP module, or as a standalone tool to manipulate a DOMDocument and return the result.
I haven't had experience with server-side JavaScript, but some issues that I believe might need to be dealt with:
Host objects like document and window are not part of the ECMAScript specification (these are objects provided by the implementing browser) so you need to make sure that the library provides equivalent host objects.
You might have security issues around executing client side scripts within a server side environment. This is a lot like allowing the user to submit a PHP script to be evaluation, so you need to make sure the security sandbox is tight.
Another (perhaps) safer and easier to implement option might be to use a modified FireFox or WebKit instance that runs as a browser, loading up the target pages and returning the modified source to your application.
From PHP 5.3 you can use V8JS extention from PHP. It's a native library that uses the new Google V8 Javascript engine to execute JS and return the result.
It's good because you can pass vars in PHP arrays and are interpreted very well
NodeJS (or some other derivative of google's v8) might actually be the best way to go here. If you're concerned about the various things nodejs can do (eg. sockets, etc), you can probably "strip it down" by removing modules and/or addons -- I think even the built in stuff is ultimately implemented in such a way that it could be stripped out fairly easily.
An alternate approach might be to simply replace, override, or remove the require function from node.js.
There's also envjs which should make it easier to run js that was designed to run the browser.
I have two servers on PHP that need to communicate, calling remote methods of each other. XML-RPC for PHP is not very good solution because it's very slow, and I can't call multiple methods in one request.
Try MultiRpc - multiple methods calling in 1 request, by encrypted and compressed protocol.
XML-RPC in PHP is pretty fast actually, if you use the built-in xmlrpc methods. It supports multiple method calls in a single request as well, using system.multiCall. The native multiCall is broken up to PHP 5.3.2 though. I've written an easy to use library for xmlrpc, called Ripcord, which allows you to very easily create servers and clients and works around most of the bugs in PHP's native xmlrpc methods. See http://ripcord.googlecode.com/
Thanks for RipCord. I think it's a very good library. I just used it and could exec some rpc in just a hour or less.
I have a PHP class I want to convert to a PHP extension. I checked some tutorials (tuxradar's writing extensions, php.net's extending php, and zend's extension writing) and it's a bit complicated.
I found the article "How to write PHP extensions" (ed note: site is defunct) and I wanted to know if it is possible to use this to make it grab a PHP class from a certain path (say /home/website1/public_html/api/class.php), execute it and return the class instance.
This way it will be usable in other websites that are hosted on the same server – each can simply call the function and it will obtain its own instance.
Is that possible?
The question as I understand it now is, The user has a PHP class that they would like to share with multiple people, but does not want to share the source code.
There are many solutions to this, they generally invovle turning the PHP code into some kind of byte code, and using a PHP extension to run the byte code. I've never used any of these solutions, but I'm aware of the following:
phc is an open source compiler for PHP
Zend Guard
HipHop for PHP - I'm unsure about this, but Facebook recently released it so it might be worth a look.
I'm sure there are others. Just Google for PHP Compiler, or PHP Accelerator.
In one sentence: I don't believe so, I think its a lot more work than that.
No, there is not tool that can do that.
Anyway, what you want call be easily accomplished with auto_prepend_file. Just make that ini directive point to a PHP file that has the class definition, and then it will be available to all the applications.
If you don't want the users to be able to use the source, you can use one the several zend extensions that allow you to pre-compile the file and use it in that form.
You can extend underlying C library functions into PHP space by writing PHP extensions. However, i think in your case you don't need to write one.
I am aware that this is an old question (being from 2012) however the answer has changed and there is now a tool that can do this. Jim Thunderbirds PHP-to-C Extension toolset provides the means to take a simple class in one file all the way up to a complicated multi file multi-level namespaced framework and convert it to a C-extension that can then be installed into your PHP server.
While in many use cases doing so is not needed as the ordinary PHP code will work just as good in some cases significant performance improvements can be experienced. The information page shows that an ordinary class (deliberately designed to take a long time) took 16.802139997482 seconds as plain vanilla PHP, and 3.9628620147705 as a PHP extension built using the tool.
As an added advantage the tool also provides an additional feature. The ability to combine PHP code (to be converted to C) and native C code within the same extension which can produce even greater performance enhancements. The same example used above only tool 0.14397192001343 seconds when much of the intensive code was moved to a bubble sort C code and simply calling it from within the PHP code.
As a side note functionally to the end developers using the code using the extension is very much similar to having the files manually included in the PHP file being developed except it doesn't have to be specifically included as it is done through the PHP extensions component.
(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this developer but am glad to have come across it as it is thus far working for converting some of my intensive classes into PHP extensions without needing to know C).
I'm trying to accomplish a task and turns out that the code I need is packaged as a PHP extension, which according to what I've been told means I have to have root access to install it (I'm on shared hosting so that's a bit of a problem.
I'll solve this problem later, but for now I'm trying to understand the difference between an extension, a library, and a class. Is it more of a packaging thing that could be overridden and repackaged a different way, or is there a valid architectural reasoning behind it?
Also when releasing your own code, what makes you decide to release as library vs. class vs. extension? or do you go with whichever sounds better?
thanks in advance.
P.S. If you must know which extension I'm talking about, it's Libpuzzle, but that's really beside the point, my question is more general.
An extension is a pice of code programmed in C which will be included into the PHP core when PHP starts. Normally you have some more native functions available after including a extension. For example a zip functionality.
A class is a abstract pice of PHP code which solves common tasks. For example sending emails. You can find some common classes at pear.php.net.
A library is a collection of PHP classes wich solve more generic tasks for example buliding HTML forms AND sending emails. The Zend Framework is a framework which consists of many, many PHP classes.
Normally extension features can be programmed in PHP. For example the PEAR::Compat class. Often you will find the functionality you need as a PHP class available. I'm sure the stackoverflow readers will supply you with ideas where to find a specific PHP class.
Extensions are low-level. Usually written in C/C++, and compiled into native-code shared libraries, they interact with the Zend Engine directly. It has pros and cons, main advantages being the speed and more control; and main disadvantages - they are harder to install, and require compilation (and that requires a compiler and PHP headers); it's not true they require root access though - you only need ability to use custom php.ini (or dl() function, but I see they deprecated it for some reason).
Libraries/classes are high-level and interpreted. If you don't know if you need to write extension, then you probably don't. About what classes are - read about OOP. A library is a reusable collection of code (most commonly in form of functions/classes).
Some libraries (including libpuzzle) also include a command-line tool. So if you're unable to use the PHP library due to your shared hosting environment, maybe you can compile the command-line tool. Then you can run it from PHP using something like exec. It will be slower and require more memory than a library, but it might get the job done. Of course, many hosts also have restrictions on commands like exec, so this might not work either.