[PHP4BETA] SAPI

As mentioned in my previous letter, half of the original SAPI, thread safety, has been pulled out and implemented separately (it didn't really belong within SAPI). We still have to implement SAPI itself. In my opinion, at least at this point, we should write a very thin abstraction layer for functions and values that are necessary to run scripts on various web servers (i.e., output functions, the file to be executed, etc). We can add functionality to that layer later on if we decide to, but for now, generalizing all server modules to work through is the important thing to do. I truly believe we can get an IIS module working in under two weeks. About future improvements to this library, as I told Rasmus, our original intention of making SAPI a de-facto standard for Web server modules does not stand any chance, in my opinion. The change in my perspective mostly happened because of my experience with COM. Knowing the way Microsoft does stuff nowadays, and how it instructs developers for MS platforms to develop, an abstraction layer of this sort will not be very attractive. All IIS extended functionality is supposed to be added through COM (including scripting languages, through IActiveScript*). Such an abstraction layer would be cool for developing simple modules, or developing modules that are targetted at being multiplatform, but switching to that library from COM programming has serious drawbacks for Win32 programmers, so I don't think that it'll ever become the de-facto standard for writing extension modules for web servers. Zeev -- ----------------------------------------------------- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> For a PGP public key, finger bourbon@netvision.net.il -- PHP 4 Beta