Zend Engine II - PHP's Oo Evolution
Zeev Suraski March 16, 2004 Body, Center, TD, P, Li {Font-Family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif; Font-size: 11px; Color: # 333333} ul {margin-left: 20; } H2 {Font-Family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif; Font-size: 16px; Color: # 336699} H3 {font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif; Font-size: 14px;
color: # 333333} Where did it all start Objects in the old daysThe limitations of the old Object ModelThe Answer Zend Engine 2What does that mean to end-users What else is new ConclusionAbout the Author One of the key ingredients in the???? upcoming version 5 of PHP is going to be the Zend Engine 2.0, with support for a brand new object oriented programming model. This article describes the evolution of the object oriented programming support in PHP, and covers the new features and changes that are scheduled for PHP 5. WHERE DID IT ALL?
NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE KNOW IT TODAY WAMER OF 1997, BACKITER OF 1997, The Summer Of 1997, Therele '' '' '' '' ''., IT GOT, IT GOT, IT GOT pretty far without having any notion of classes or objects -. it was to be a purely structured language One of these summer nights however, on August 27th, this changed At the time classes were introduced to the source tree of what was to become PHP. 3.0, they were added as syntactic sugar for accessing collections. PHP already had the notion of associative arrays collections, and the new critters were nothing but a neat new way of accessing them. However, as time has proven, this new syntax proved to have a much more far-reaching effect on PHP than was originally intended. Another thing that most people do not know, is that by the time PHP 3.0 came out officially, mid 1998, and was gaining momentum at a staggering rate, Andi Gutmans and I were already determined to shutrite the l anguage implementation. Users may have liked it, in fact we know they did, but as the authors of the engine, we knew what was going on under the hood and we could not live at peace with that. The rewrite, which was later dubbed 'Zend Engine' (Zend being a combination of Zeev and Andi), was both the trigger for and one of the core components in the 2nd revolution PHP went through in just over a year. This revolution, however, left PHP's object model mostly Unchanged from Version 3 - IT WAS STILL VERY SIMPLE. Objects Were Still Very Much Syntactic Sugar for Associative Arrays, And Didn't Offer Users Too Many Features on Top of That.
Objects in the old days So, what could you do with objects back in the PHP 3.0 and for that matter, the current PHP 4.0 days? Not that much. Objects were essentially containers of properties, like associative arrays. The biggest difference was that objects had to belong to a class. Classes, like in other languages, contained a collection of properties and methods (functions), and objects could be instantiated from them using the new operator. Single inheritance was supported, allowing users to extend (or specialize) the scope of an existing class without having to write it from scratch or copy it. Finally, PHP 4.0 also added the ability to call methods of a specific class, from both within and outside object contexts. One of the biggest twists in PHP's history was the fact that despite the very limited functionality, and despite a host of problems and limitations, object oriented programming in PHP thrived, and became the most popular paradigm for the growing numbers of off-the-shelf P HP applications. This trend, which was mostly unexpected, caught PHP in a sub-optimal situation. The fact that objects were not behaving like objects in other OO languages, and were instead behaving like associating arrays was beginning to show. The limitations of the Old Object Model The Most Problematic Aspects of The PHP 3 / PHP 4 Object Model Was The Fact That Objects Were Passed by value, and not by reference by value, and not by reference by value.
What does that mean Let's say you have a simple, somewhat useless function, called myFunction (): function myFunction ($ arg) {$ arg = 5;} And you call this function:? $ MyArgument = 7; myFunction ($ myArgument) ; print $ myArgument; As you probably know, the call to myFunction () will leave $ myArgument unchanged; What is sent to myFunction () is a copy of $ myargument's value, and not $ myargument itself This type of argument passing is called. passing arguments by value. Passing arguments by reference is done by most structured languages, and is extremely useful, as it allows you to write your functions, or call other people's functions without worrying about side effects they may have variables outside their scope. However, Consider The Following Example: Function WED ($ Bride, $ GROOM) {IF ($ GROOM) & $ GROOM-> Setwife ($ bride) {return true;} else {return false;}} ($ Joanne, $ Joe); Print Aremarried ($ Joanne, $ JOE); (The Implementation of Woman :: setHusband, Man :: setWife () and areMarried () is left as an exercise for the reader). What will areMarried () return? We would hope that the two newlyweds would manage to stay married at least until the following line of code, but as you may have guessed -..?. they would not areMarried () will confirm that they got divorced just as soon as they got married Why The reason is simple Because objects in PHP 3.0 and 4.0 are not 'special ', And Behave, When You Pass $ Joanne Ane $ Joe To WED (), You Pass Clones OR Replicas of Them.
So, while their clones end up being married inside wed (), the real $ joe and $ joanne remain within a safe distance from the sacrament of holy matrimony, in their protected outer-scope. Of course, PHP 3 and 4 did give you . an option to force your variables be passed by reference, consequently allowing functions to change the arguments that were passed to them in the outer scope If we defined wed () 's prototype like this: function wed (& $ bride, & $ groom ) then Joanne and Joe would have had better luck (or not, depending on your point of view). However, it gets more complicated than that. For instance, what if you want to return an object from a function, by reference? What if you want to make modifications to $ this inside the constructor, without worrying about what may happen when it gets copied back from new's result into the container variable [#]? While PHP 3 and 4 did address these problems to a certain extent by providing Syntactic Hacks to Pass Around Objects by Reference, They Never A ddressed the core of the problem: Objects and other types of values are not created equal, Therefore, Objects should be passed around by reference unless stated otherwise The Answer - Zend Engine 2 When we were finally convinced that objects are indeed special creatures, and. deserve their own distinct behavior, it was only the first step. We had to come up with a way of doing this without interfering with the rest of the semantics of PHP, and preferably, without having to rewrite the whole of PHP itself. luckily, ................... ..
The object handles would be essentially numbers, indices in a global object table. Much like any other kind of variables, they will be passed and returned by value. However, thanks to this new level of indirection, since we will be now moving around handles to the objects, and not the objects themselves, effectively -..? PHP will behave as if the objects themselves are passed by reference Let's go back to Joe and Joanne How would wed () behave differently now First off, $ joanne and $ joe will no longer be objects, but rather, object handles, let's say 4 and 7 respectively. These integer handles point to slots in some global objects table where the actual objects sit. When we send them to wed (), the local variables $ bride and $ groom will receive the values 4 and 7; setHusband () will change the object referenced by 4; setWife () will change the object referenced by 7; and when wed () returns, $ joanne and $ joe will already be living the First Day of the rest of their limited together. What does that mean to end-users? Alright, so the ending to the story is now more idyllic, but what does it mean to PHP developers? Quite a few things. First, it means that your applications will run faster, as there will be much less data-copying going around. For instance, when you send $ joe to a function, instead of having to create a replica, and copy over his name, birth date, parents' name, list of former addresses, social security number and whatnot - PHP will only have to pass on one object handle, one integer of course, a direct result of this is also a significant amount of memory savings -. storing an integer takes much less space than storing a full-fledged replica of the object.
But perhaps more importantly, the new object model makes object oriented programming in PHP much more powerful and intuitive. No longer will you have to mess up with cryptic & signs in order to get the job done. No longer will you have to worry about whether changes you make to the object inside the constructor will survive the dreaded new-operator behavior. No longer will you ever have to stay up until 2:00 am tracking elusive bugs! Ok, maybe I'm lying with that last one, but seriously, the new object model reduces the object-related stay-up-until-2:. 00am type of bugs very significantly In turn, it means that the feasibility of using PHP for large scale projects becomes much more easy to explain What else is new. ? As one could expect, the Zend Engine 2 packs quite a few other features to go along with its brand new object model. Some of them further enhance object-oriented features, like private member variables and methods, static variables and language-level aggregation Most notable is the revolutionized interaction with external component models, such as Java, COM / DCOM and .NET through overloading; In comparison to PHP 4.0, which first introduced this sort of integration, the new implementation is quicker (by a wide margin), more complete , more reliable and even easier to maintain and extend. This means that PHP 5.0 will play very nicely in your existing Java or .NET based setup, and you will be able to use your existing components inside PHP, transparently, as if they were regular . PHP objects Unlike PHP 4.0 which had a special implementation for such overloaded objects, in the Zend Engine 2 / PHP 5.0 - all objects use the same interface, including the built-in PHP objects.
This ensures that PHP objects and overloaded objects behave in exactly the same way. Finally, the Zend Engine 2 also brings exception handling to PHP. The sad reality is that most developers, to date, write code which does not handle error situations gracefully. It's not uncommon to see sites that spit out cryptic database errors to your browser, instead of displaying a well-phrased 'An error has occurred' kind of message With PHP, the key reason for this is that handling error situations is a daunting task. - you actually have to check for the return value of each and every function Since set_error_handler () was added, things became slightly better, as it became possible to centralize error handling -. but it still left a lot to be desired The addition of exception. handling to PHP will allow developers both fine-grained error recovery, but perhaps more importantly, graceful application-wide error recovery. Conclusion The release of PHP 5.0, powered by the Zend Engine 2.0, will mark a significant step forward in PHP's evolution as one of the key Web platforms in the world today. While keeping its firm commitment to users who prefer using the functional structured syntax of PHP, it will make a giant leap for those who are interested in its object oriented capabilities, and especially the companies developing large scale applications. About the Author Zeev has been working for over five years on the PHP project. Along with Andi Gutmans, he started the PHP 3 and 4 projects and wrote most of their infrastructure and core components, Thereby helping to forge php as we know it today and attracting many more uspers to join in.
