Re: [PHP4BETA] proposed fopen_wrappers generalization / patch v.2

Precedence: bulk

Hello,

While we are discussing this topic, has anybody thought of adding hooks to
PHP to make it register stream handlers with user space classes?

That would allow programmers that know PHP but not C, to develop new
handlers for arbitrary types of streams that could eventually interface
with external programs but for the users it would work like normal files.

Programmers could develop new stream handlers without having to develop in
C and not having to write an extension that needs to be compiled to be
used.

I can imagine a miriad of stream handler extensions been written in PHP and
contributed by anybody.

The way it could work is like this:

- Have a function to register URL types with a given class.
- When fopen() is called, a new instance of the class is created and the
  default constructor would be called.
- There would be a standard set of methods and a metadata structure to
  let PHP figure what capabilities the stream handling class can implement,
  just to antecipate the evolution of the stream handling frame work and to
  provide emulation of features that may not be supported in the stream
  handler class.

A nice capability that could be possible with this is to have stream
handlers that act just as stream data filters, for instance to handle
transparent compression, encryption, format conversion, etc..

I think this would be neat and most important it would be powerful without
requiring users to learn a new set of STREAM API functions.  What do you
think?

Here's an example:

class https_stream_handler
{
	var $metadata=array(
		"Support"=>array(
			"Write"=>1,
			"Read"=>0,
			"SeekForward"=>1,
			"SeekBackward"=>0
		)
	);
	var $error="";

  Function open($URL,$mode)
  {
  	callCurl($url);
  }

  Function read(&$buffer,$length)
  {
  }

  Function seek($position)
  {
  }

  Function close($position)
  {
  }
};

RegisterStreamHandler("https","https_stream_handler");




Regards,
Manuel Lemos

Web Programming Components using PHP Classes.
Look at: http://phpclasses.UpperDesign.com/[email protected]
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E-mail: [email protected]
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