PHP LINQ?

nospam@example.com (Jonathan Bond-Caron) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:49:11 -0400

When it comes to writing Web applications, a developer often needs to access data from a multitude of data sources. The result is often a lot of spaghetti code that iterates and filters the results (XML, csv, soap, REST services, and so on).

But the most common data that's accessed is in a relational database. Luckily, at some point database vendors agreed on SQL (standard query language) which is a common way to access /query data from a database.

With the reality of the Web, wouldn't it be nice to have some form of standard query language to access many forms of data?? That's what Microsoft's LINQ attempts to offer.

It's a great innovation and I was curious about what a PHP API could look like and it turns out there's a good discussion here:
http://www.mikeborozdin.com/post/Is-PHPLinq-As-Cool-As-Real-LINQ.aspx

The advantage of LINQ in .NET is how the LINQ expressions can be evaluated and compiled. In short, it takes the expressions ("pretty" code) and builds the "spaghetti code that iterates and filters the results" automatically. If the compiler is smart and can make proper machine level optimizations, I would guess it means very fast execution and a standard way of accessing data. Amazing!

As for PHP, Maarten Balliauw still went ahead and created a PHP implementation of LINQ:

http://www.codeplex.com/PHPLinq/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=10084

It's definetly "interesting" at this point and if PHP could support natively some form of LINQ, it would be a major achievement and very cool stuff.

There's also a java version of "LINQ" (Quaere):
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=46887

Short PHP array synthax

nospam@example.com (Jonathan Bond-Caron) — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:31:03 -0400

There's an RFC that has been recently declined through the PHP internals list. It is a minor change/patch to introduces a short synthax to declare arrays in PHP.

To declare an array in PHP, you currently use the following synthax:



$a = array('foo' => 'bar', 'nestarray' => array(0, 1, 5));

The proposed patch (a few lines) would allow to declare arrays in a shorter form:



$a = array('foo' => 'bar', 'nestarray' => array(0, 1, 5));



// New synthax

$a = ['foo'=> 'bar', 'nestarray'=> [0, 1, 5]];

// Or

$a = ['foo': 'bar', 'nestarray': [0, 1, 5]];

This notation is used by many programming languages, most notably javascript. Since PHP is essentially a programming language used for the Web, my opinion is it makes perfect sense to support a javascript-like notation for arrays.

There's some resistance from the core developers and overall there were too many veto (negative) votes. I definitely understand their concern but feel it's a natural evolution of the language, this to me seems like something most users would want to see in PHP.

Hopefully, the PHP community can speak out enough to get better idea of what the users / php community wants.

The actual proposal and more info at:
http://wiki.php.net/rfc/shortsyntaxforarrays.

Jonathan Bond-Caron - Ideas & Experiments - PHP

PHP LINQ?

Short PHP array synthax