Re: parent_ctor()

Zeev Suraski wrote: > You can inherit from them, extend them, and > do whatever you can, except read their source. The proper and > only way to use such scripts as building blocks (as opposed to > a full ready-made application) would be by receiving a clear > API documentation. No introspection/reflection would do, and > I'm not even going to try to make PHP more powerful in that > regard, since it's not going to be enough anyway. Every class has instance variables and methods which there and which are necessary, but which are not part of the public interface. Once you have classware, you need to be able to mark the private parts of your classware as private (while still making them accessible for those who are desperate enough to use them). That's why "private" is much more of a necessity with classware than with source availbale. Also, several other properties we have talked about are extremely useful in such a classware context, as I have tried to make you all here understand. Hidden source really changes the development paradigm in the high end of the PHP community. > >I can assure you that the day a compiler and bytecode protection > >become available, I'll get the order to abandon PHPLIB > >development from my management. > > That's a bit sad, I think, but that's a different issue. I do not like it a bit, but these are the forces of economy at work. My dept head has a 6 month goal to reach, and he will gladly try anything to boost his baseline. That's not to say he is an evil PHB. He is in fact quite a nice guy, and in favor of PHPLIB himself, but then NetUSE _is_ a company and their goal is to make money. They will want to at least try PHPLIB as a method to generate revenue for a change. We will see what comes of it. > As I said, I don't see the Zend compiler having a significant > affect on the development model of PHP applications in the > future. I don't see it as a contender to COM or EJB. That's a different story. PHP is seen by the market as the free counterpart of former ASP, for the moment known ASP+ and .NET, and as a very successful counterpart, that is. You know the stats perhaps better than I do. Whatever: The technologies shown in PHP act as the entry barrier for commercial web solutions. What PHP can do is what is known to the Open Source community and what is available for free. PHP is constructed from the technologies which are understood so thouroughly that everybody has them available. Whatever a new commercial solution provides: If it wants to be a player in the web application market, it has to be better than PHP in order to distinguish itself and in order to justify its price tag. So PHP might not want to be a contender for the ASP/COM team, or Cold Fusion, or for EJB, or for WebObjects or for whatever else. But it is point zero on the scale where all these technologies are measured (and not all score positively, I assure you). You can't do anything against that, except perhaps stop playing. And who was it, who wrote the COM interoperability module and bragged about it? :-) And which language can call Java methods, and will soon be able to do Corba as well? PHP has serious assimilation capabilities. You built them, didn't you? Kristian (listening to Queen, "The Works", "Is this the world we created?") -- Kristian Köhntopp, NetUSE AG Siemenswall, D-24107 Kiel Tel: +49 431 386 436 00, Fax: +49 431 386 435 99 Using PHP3? See our web development library at http://phplib.netuse.de/