Re: File system watcher/monitoring

Hi Stas, On 14/02/13 22:37, Stas Malyshev wrote:

Hi!

A missing feature in PHP is a file system watcher/monitoring available for almost all platforms. On Linux, we have inotify (available in PHP through pecl/inotify), on Mac OS X, we have /dev/fsevents (not available in PHP, since we need ioctl to do that in pure PHP —and sudo—, no C extension needed), on FreeBSD, we have FAM, and on Windows, we have FileSystemWatcher in .NET. All major platforms have a solution ready to use.

I think it'd be great to have a library with unified interface and an extension that uses it. However, I'm not sure if these libraries are useful in common php use case - short-lived requests. Could I get the changes since the last request? Or is it useful only for long-running persistent processes? It is only useful for long-running processes.

For example when you are writting tests: at each modifications, you would like to re-run or re-generate tests. In this case, you have a daemon that watches files changes and executes a command when needed. Another more concrete example is with EventSource [1]. The browser maintains opened a connection and the server writes on this connection step-by-step (or… chunk-by-chunk since it uses the chunk feature of HTTP1.1). It is very useful to develop some “realtime-tools”. I made a video [2] to illustrate (code is here [3]). This is very naive and not optimized at all, but this is a short POC to show you an interesting usecase.

Is it possible to have such a feature landing in PHP (core if karma allows it)? or do you want such a feature?

I'm not sure why it has to be in core though. I don't see so far anything that requires modifying language core. The core integration was a joke, forget it ;-).

Regards. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/ [2] https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26317193/Realtime_edition.webm [3] http://paste.hoa-project.net/9f15189c05ef0961d374fe7e6c70b3b2b27c8b64 -- Ivan Enderlin Developer of Hoa http://hoa-project.net/ PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis) http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/ Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C http://w3.org/