Re: Net_FTP design issues

Hi Greg Beaver! On 10/14/2004 11:10 AM you wrote:

On the other hand, if native ftp is available, one can't include the code at all. This will make the user's job much more complex. Instead of

I would have a depending include of the socket based code, wether the FTP extension is available or not. I guess there's no sense in using a socket based implementation, if a C based solution exists.

<?php require_once 'Net/Ftp.php'; ?> we will then have to go <?php if (!function_exists('ftp_whatever')) {

    include_once 'Net/Ftp.php';

} ?>

This would be done inside the main Net/FTP.php file. It will check if native FTP is available and include the socket based code, if not.

Also, what if you decide you want to add new functionality later? You can't. Procedural code is completely inappropriate for a package like Net_FTP.

The main benefit would be, that people who wanna use a script depending on the FTP extension can do so without changing the script, even if they don't want to use the Net_FTP class.

This also smacks of greater-than-needed complexity in the implementation. Better is to expect that speed-hungry users will use the native ftp functions no matter what, and that everyone else will welcome the abstraction that allows a redistributable application to run without the ftp extension dependency.

A good compromise solution is to provide a file that has wrapper functions to the procedural functions. This will satisfy the users who want to only use the procedural stuff.

This would mean complete code changes (which I wanted to avoid in the PHP4 version of Net_FTP) to Net_FTP itself. The function based solution would allow us to just include the code conditionally and let the Net_FTP class run under any kind of circumstances. Thanks for your comments, Greg! Regards, Toby -- Tobias Schlitt GPG Key: 0xA6529579 a passion for php http://www.schlitt.info Like to say "thank you"? - http://pear.php.net/wishlist.php/toby