Proposal for a new extension AMFEXT

Hello everybody, I would like to propose to add a new PECL extension for encoding and decoding ActionScript Messages (AMF) for faster data exchange between PHP and Flash. The extension has already been implemented, tested and integrated by the amfphp project, and the people SabreAMF are doing the same. If the extension is present amfphp takes advantage of it otherwise it uses the PHP serializer. The idea of this extension is to provide the core elements of the AMF encoding and decoding while demanding the higher level handling to PHP. The extension has just two functions amf_encode and amf_decode, while flexibility has been provided by some callback functions that control how objects are encoded and decoded. Moreover recordsets can be encoded quite efficiently with a specific callback. There is an implementation detail that I would like to point out. During encoding I was initially using the smart_str type for storing the encoding, but it was scaling bad with big data to encode. I've solved the problem with a StringBuilder data structure that is able to scalable well with data, and also it stores references to PHP string if they are longer than a threshold, something that happens frequently during encoding. Internally the data structure is made of a list of allocation blocks, and each allocation block is a sequence of raw datas or references to zval. I don't know if this StringBuilder could be useful for other uses, in the meanwhile I've packed it as a resource, that can be used independently on AMF encoding. In particular the StringBuilder can be sent to a stream without flattening into a string. The extension has been currently published on http://www.teslacore.it/wiki/index.php?title=AMFEXT where it is possible to obtain details on the encoding and the StringBuilder. I am planning to move the source code into the amfphp project in SourceForge or better in a new project. The extension is licensed under PHP License Version 3. Do you think that such extension could be interesting or useful? Best Regards, Emanuele Ruffaldi -- Emanuele Ruffaldi Computer Engineer - PhD. Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa PERCRO Lab - Virtual Reality and Telerobotic Systems Division via Martiri 11 56100 Pisa - ITALY Tel.: +39 050 838 980 Fax.: +39 050 883 333 E-mail: emanuele.ruffaldi@sssup.it Web: http://www.teslacore.it