Re: PHP 5.4 - Meta attribute (aka. Annotations) support discussion

The patch is already written and a RFC created by Guilherme: http://wiki.php.net/rfc/annotations . I personally think annotations could make a *great* addition to PHP. I agree with Will that annotations are especially useful for SOAP and XML-RPC. I personally think annotations are useful for APIs in general. Instead of creating a method to respond to a XML-RPC call, then binding it to a specific XML-RPC call with a line in the initialization you could just do this: @xmlrpc({ name : "server.getValue", params : { param1 : { type : "number", docs : "This is documentation for param1" } } }); public getValForXMLRPC ($param) { ... I just used JSON for the syntax of annotation. I did this for two reasons: 1. most PHP developers can write some Javascript, and 2. since this is supposed to avoid syntax discussions, I used a syntax no one uses for annotations, but everyone understands. The possibilities are endless with Annotations and as long as they are pretty speedy I think they would be picked up quite quickly and we would get some great examples from the community. My 2 cents. -Alec On 11/15/2010 6:54 PM, Will Fitch wrote:

I have certainly wanted them many times - especially when using SOAP. Having WSDL auto-generation without compromising developer documentation and attempting to have user-land code parse phpdoc for this purpose seem{ed,s} counterintuitive. That said, introducing annotations is a HUGE undertaking and would require a ton of work with potentially little return. I do think it would be worth looking into in a future major release, but there are quite a few other things that would be more beneficial to the community for immediate discussions. Did anyone write and RFC on this? guilhermeblanco has a good start. On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Pierre Joye<pierre.php@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Zeev Suraski<zeev@zend.com> wrote:

Suggesting phpdoc is used for the purposes mentioned does not mean we

don't understand what we're talking about. I feel like you never used annotations in other languages, did you? Cheers, -- Pierre @pierrejoye | http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php