See How to escape quote PHP strings generated by Delphi?
I am just interested to hear if anyone has used Delphi (or possibly BCB) as a code generator for PHP ...
(or thoughts about code generation from one language to another in general)
Hmm, any good books about code generation ?
I've generated javascript, SQL and Delphi many times. But mostly is basic substitution, (and the example in the post you mention looks the same), not really codegeneration in the "compiler" sense of the word.
But there are also many real compilers in Pascals and Delphi like dialects. The biggest one I think is Free Pascal (http://www.freepascal.org), which is a compiler for Object Pascal (aka delphi)
(added later:)
Besides variable substitution, basic templating engines also fall in this category. Templates are sometimes easier maintainable than the same fragement code. Specially in html/cgi land this is used a lot.
You can generate anything from a tool which can export text files no?
You can write all by the hand, or in a "delphi style" by using Delphi for PHP http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi-for-php
best regards,
anyone has used Delphi (or possibly BCB) as a code generator for PHP
PHP - no, but I'm generating a lot of Delphi/Pascal code from Delphi. I've also generated all other things used for a web application: HTML, JavaScript, CSS - but never PHP because I didn't need that. So it's possible, but simply knowing it's possible is not going to help you much.
thoughts about code generation from one language to another in general
You need to look into "text template engines" for Delphi. I can't suggest any because I wrote my own (and I'm not planing on releasing my own under any license).
Related
I just inherited a website written in PHP to internationalize it... The problem is the code is not consistent. It has some functions that have strings inside echo and another pieces and in another functions the php is closed and html is presented the right way.
I was looking for a tool that could easy my job as much as possible. Retrieving as much strings as it could and defining (through defines) in another file.
I though about creating a script with regex functions to achieve this but if there was anything out there... I looked but couldn't find. Maybe I'm using wrong terms as I'm not English native.
Does anyone know a good way to do this?
If you are open to using gettext for I18N, then you can use xgettext: http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/gettext/xgettext-Invocation.html
Here is a tutorial detailing how you can use it in PHP: http://www.phpdig.net/ref/rn26.html
I'm looking for a way to have to write and maintain a certain algorithm (a graphics rendering sub-module of my code, actually) only once. I need the algorithm in C++, PHP and Javascript. Theoretically I could write it in C++ and wrap it into a PHP extension; but that has many issues of itself and doesn't solve the Javascript link.
What I'm looking for, I think, is a tool that converts from a language (doesn't matter which one) into the three (or two, if the source language is one of the three) output languages I'm targetting. I've found MetaL (http://www.meta-language.net/) which seems to do what I want but also looks dead (no updates since 2007) and only targets one of the three languages I need. It needs to be quite flexible and allow me to update the results - for example, I use Cairo in my C++ and PHP rendering, and HTML Canvas on the Javascript side. So I need to customize to the API for certain effects.
Alternatively, I'd settle for a PHP parser and lexer that would give me an AST with enough information for me to write generators for C++ and Javascript as an alternative backend.
Any ideas? Thanks.
You could take a look at Haxe. Haxe is an open source programming language. It can be compiled to JavaScript, Flash/ActionScript, PHP, C++, Java, C#, Python and Lua.
The Emscripten project (which I only spotted last week) might interest you: http://syntensity.blogspot.com/2011/04/emscripten-10.html
This guy has basically written a compiler for C/C++ that compiles to Javascript code.
That should solve the Javascript side of your problem.
Hope that helps.
Another product along the same lines, and a bit more well known is Google Web Toolkit (GWT). It's based on Java, but the end result is similar -- you write your web application in Java code and it compiles the front-end parts into Javascript and the back-end parts into regular Java bytecode. I know you're not asking for Java, but if it interest you, the link is here: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Slightly less useful, but possibly more relevant to your question is PHPJS. This is a project to implement as much of the PHP language in Javascript as possible. They're doing it on a function-by-function basis, so it's only ever going to be an approximation, but given that the language syntaxes are similar, it may be possible to use it to write code that works unchanged in native PHP and also in Javascript on the client side.
Of course the one big down-side of compiling one language into another is that the resulting code is always going to be sub-optimal. There's not much you can do about that, but it's worth bearing in mind before you start down the path of writing a shared code-base in a single language.
Maybe look into 'coding' your original algorithm in xml and using various xslt templates to output to your target languages ? Or possibly antlr (http://www.antlr.org/ http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Antlr-Reference-Domain-Specific-Programmers/dp/0978739256/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303114884&sr=1-1).
Maybe you can just Write it in javascript and then use a C++ and PHP javascript interpreter.
A completely different approach would be to use assembly code. Write the algorithm in a language of your choice, compile it to ASM source. Then provide the interface wrappers in the deployment languages.
Of course this is all so much 'air pie'. It depends upon so many variables, number of target platforms, importance of optimization, frequency of interface change related to implementation change etc etc
Update:
This question is a duplicate of Are there any programming languages targeting PHP, besides Haxe?
The answers given here appear to be disjoint from those given at the other node, so this question was not (yet) deleted. If possible, please merge the answers here into the other node.
Question:
Is there any such thing as a programming language (other than an esoteric language such as BrainF##$, or the languages PHP or VB) that you can "compile" into non-obfuscated PHP source code?
Rationale:
Swip wants to generate ordinary PHP code because it is so ubiquitous for the types of projects swip wants to do. Unfortunately swip would like to actually avoid writing PHP -- strange but true! Swip is crazy enough to want to generate PHP source code without having to type any PHP into Swip's editor.
Take a look at
http://github.com/juliend2/phlower
This project claims about itself:
phlower (pronounced flower) is a small ruby script that compiles the Awesome code (invented by MACournoyer for his book void://createyourproglang.com/ ) into PHP code.
This script is written in Ruby and it depends on the racc gem.
Wasabi compiles down to PHP, but you'll have to beg Joel Spolsky for a copy.
I don't know what swip is, but this is not really possible. There are tools to aid the programmer in doing this, but they will not run without deep human interaction and refactoring. What you want is a skilled programmer.
Edit
I think I misunderstood, you want a scripting language to script PHP? While php compiles to bytecode internally, it isn't like java or .net where you can use different languages to do it. What are you trying to accomplish?
I need to parse PHP & JavaScript documents structure to get the info about document functions & their parameters, classes & their methods, variables, and so on ...
I'm wondering if there is any solution for doing that (no regular expressions) ... I've heard about something called "lexing" however I was unable to find any examples even the ones that could me tell if this is something what I am looking for or not ...
thanks in advance
By "Lexing" your referring to Lexical Analysis, and there are some ancient tools which mostly still work named Lex and Yacc. Lex builds the tokenizer, and Yacc stands for "yet another compiler compiler" and is the actual parser.
The concept of lex/Yacc, is you build a grammar for the language, and then run the grammar through the paslex tool to generate source code (normally in C) that you can use to parse a file and take action on specific keywords and tokens. Martin Waldenburg wrote a pascal version of lex/yacc named PasLex which has been kicking around for way over a decade now and has been converted to Delphi (although it might not work with the latest versions without some minor work). If I remember correctly, it uses the same .L grammar input files as lex, so any documentation you find for lex/yacc can also be applied to paslex, with the exception that you get pascal code as the output.
I'm not sure about current documentation availability. Before the internet (gasp) we used books and most of this was heavily documented on paper which has long turned yellow...however, rumor has it that you might..just might be able to pick up a used copy from Amazon. I cut my teeth on this using a book which is also known as "the dragon book" which appears to have been re-published as recently as 2006.
EDIT:
I was mistaken by the tool, it was TPLY. PasLex was a delphi grammar implementation...TPLY was the Lex/Yacc tool which generated pascal source from a .L file.
I'm not sure if this is feasible but for PHP would you be able to invoke the PHP CLI from Delphi to get the information?
If so you could call token_get_all() and then spit out the result in something that you can parse in Delphi (maybe xml, json, etc.). This is lexing. The problem with this is that is only half the problem solved - you still have to understand each token in context to get the results you want.
I've been looking for some guidelines on how to layout PHP code. I've found some good references, such as the following:
http://www.dagbladet.no/development/phpcodingstandard/
and this question on SO.
However, none of that quite gets to what I'm specifically wondering about, which is the integration of HTML and PHP. For example:
Is it OK to have a PHP file that starts out with HTML tags and only has PHP inserted where needed? Or should you just have one section of PHP code that contains everything?
If you have a chunk of PHP code in the middle of which is a set of echo's that just output a fixed bit of HTML, is it better to break out of PHP and just put in the HTML directly?
Should functions all be defined in dedicated PHP files, or is it OK to define a bunch of functions at the top of a file and call them later on in that same file?
There are probably other questions I'd like to ask, but really I'm looking for someone to point me at some kind of resource online that offers guidance on the general idea of how HTML and PHP should be combined together.
Combining programming code and output data (including HTML) is IMHO a very bad idea. Most of the PHP gurus I know use a template engine such as Smarty to help keep the two things separate.
There's really not a single, common standard for these things. Most languages are more restrictive than PHP in this sense.
In the later years, a lot of so-called frameworks have emerged, and amongst other things they define a set of rules for everything from naming over where to place files and to which style your code should follow. There are several frameworks around, so you can't really pick one and call it the standard. However, most frameworks have a subset of commonality. For example, most follows some variant of the PEAR Coding Standards.
I usually try and follow the standards that are set by the language's core libraries.... oh wait.
Seriously through - you should try and follow the MVC pattern in any web application as it is pretty much standard practice regardless of language. In PHP this can be achieved in a quick-and-dirty way by treating index.php as your controller and separating data logic and presentation by file. This small step will at least let you move your code to a full featured framework when and if you choose.
Use a template engine when you can. If you haven't learned one, or don't want the overhead (which is minimal), use practices that cause you to have quick-and-dirty templating:
Functions that do not display anything have no place in a file that does display something.
Print variables, not HTML. Whenever outputting HTML, break out of the PHP and write HTML with print statements to handle any small details that are needed (actions for forms, IDs for controls, etc.).
Remember, when you include a file that breaks out of the PHP to print content, that will be treated the same as if you do it in the main file. So you can create simple templates that just included PHP files, and those files will print variables in the right places. Your index.php (or whatever) does all the real work, but all the display is done by the secondary "template".
Many PHP tutorials intermix logic and display code. It took me years to break the bad habits that encouraged in me. In my experience you can't separate things too much in PHP, and entropy will pull you towards intermixed code if you don't fight it.
Coding standards should be more than how to layout your syntax, but sadly that's what they tend to be in PHP.
FWIW, phc will pretty print your code in the Zend style.