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5.8 Feature showcase: Accessing class interna

The XP Framework's 5.8-SERIES contains a feature that will allow the reflection API to access private and protected members. Of course, just because you can, doesn't mean you should, as this does allow you to break the encapsulation principle.

On the other side, this feature comes in handy for serialization mechanisms, as well as for reflection-based factory or delegation patterns.

5.8.0RC2: The second pre-release of the upcoming 5.8-SERIES

The XP group is proud to announce the immediate availabality of 5.8.0, release candidate #2. On top of the features contained in RC1, the following have been implemented:

• Extension methods - see RFC #0189
  
• SystemExit - see RFC #0181
  

  $ cd ~/xp
  $ wget http://releases.xp-framework.net/setup/5.8.0RC2 -O - | php -- -d ~/bin/

Y2K38

In a recent Sitepoint article, the author talks about problems with PHP's strtotime() function, which can be basically summed up to this:

  $ xp -e 'Console::writeLine(date("l d F Y H:i", strtotime("2040-02-01")));'
  Thursday 01 January 1970 01:00

<?php 
  $d= new Date('2040-02-01'); 
  Console::writeLine($d->toString('l d F Y H:i'));  // Wednesday 01 February 2040 00:00
?>

Workaround for Socket::canRead() failing with PHP's VC9 binaries

A workaround was added to the peer.Socket class which fixes up this method raising exceptions although the underlying select() call succeeded. This occurres when PHP's VC9 binaries are used - the native function will issue a warning "Invalid CRT parameters detected" which is incorrectly thought of to be an error. This is documented in PHP bug #49948.

Extension methods implementation revamped

Just shortly after announcing the removal of the original extension methods implementation we have now come up with a faster, less-clumsy and well-behaving extension method implementation - and have reactivated the corresponding RFC, scheduled for implementation in SVN next week.

PHP 5.3.3 support

Following the release of PHP 5.3.3, the XP Framework now supports this PHP version in both 5.7.11-dev and 5.8.0-dev release branches.

5.8.0RC1: The first pre-release of the upcoming 5.8-SERIES

The 5.8-branch has now been maintained since almost a year, gathering features and maturity and is now basically a 5.7.11-dev with the most of the items planned for the 5.8.0 release:

• Revamped generics implementation - will now also work for primitives
  
• Private / protected member access via reflection even without PHP 5.3's setAccessible()
  
• A new ArrayType class and the typeof(var) core functionality to complete the XP framework's type system
  
• The array and map indexer this() to reduce temporary variables with missing array dereferencing
  
• ...and many more

  $ cd ~/xp
  $ wget http://releases.xp-framework.net/setup/5.8.0RC1 -O - | php -- -d ~/bin/

Generics of primitives

Like in C# (and unlike Java), primitives can be used as components of generics in the 5.8-SERIES. Given a vector util.collections.Vector<string>, the following applies:

<?php 
  // OK
  $v[]= "Hello";
  
  // Throws a lang.IllegalArgumentException 
  $v[]= 1;
?>

RFC #0093: xml.meta

Scope of Change
The xml.meta API will be extended to include a way to marshal objects to trees instead of only to strings, and unmarshal XML from streams.

Rationale

• Performance improvement over Tree::fromString(Marshaller::marshal())
• Use the tree / node objects for further modification
• Performance improvement over Unmarshaller::unmarshal(Streams::readAll())

Extension methods removed

The extension method implementation has been removed from the 5.8 branch again, its quality and performance was way below expectation:

1. Clumsy declaration syntax
   The xp::extensions('lang.types.ArrayList', __CLASS__); in the static initializer block looks weird, it should be replaced by a more syntax-like feature, e.g. a base class (like enums), annotations (like the new generics implementations) or a construct like export().
   
2. Full import
   As of point where a class gets used, its extension methods were globally available, not only for the scope they were used in. This may lead to confusion about methods "appearing" on objects all of a sudden.
   
3. Slow implementation
   The first shot came with a serious performance impact, more needed to work around #2
   

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