News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by adlawson on Sunday July 06, 2014 @01:26PM (#7995045)
I know PHP isn't the "coolest" of languages around, but I thought I'd just show my project I started a few years ago and never really got around to finishing.

It's been used before as part of a mustache template runtime evaluator and in test suites.

Current issues:

- Test coverage is okay but could definitely be improved (currently ~60%)

- Symlinks

- Proper support for perms/ACL

If anyone's got any feedback or wants to contribute, go ahead.

Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by Gigablah on Sunday July 06, 2014 @11:23PM (#7996867)
Hm, I wonder if I can marry this with Flysystem (https://github.com/thephpleague/flysystem) so I can use PHP builtin functions rather than being tied to their API.

Maybe I'll give it shot!

Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by jlogsdon on Monday July 07, 2014 @08:59AM (#7998550)
You can use PHP built-in functions. Check out the readme. The API is shown alongside using functions like file_put_contents and require.
Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by Gigablah on Monday July 07, 2014 @09:31AM (#7998690)
I know, I'm referring to using those built-in functions in place of Flysystem's API. Basically a proxy.
Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by aceperry on Sunday July 06, 2014 @06:05PM (#7996041)
Very cool project. This pushes the bounds of what I expect, especially from php.
Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by encoderer on Sunday July 06, 2014 @08:24PM (#7996385)
One nice upside to the (often negative) impression of PHP is that when you put in some time and produce something kinda cool, you get a lot of positive attention from the community. I experienced this myself on a project to create a multi-processing library for php (https://github.com/shaneharter/PHP-Daemon)
Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by PeterGriffin on Sunday July 06, 2014 @02:31PM (#7995230)
I didn't have time to review the project in detail, but one thing that made an impression on me is having a registry in there.

Many projects make the same mistake. The registry/service locator/DI container or whatever flavor you prefer should be an application concern.

Applications should create this for themselves, and not every library having its own registry just for instances of its own classes.

Similarly you have factories and builders which wrap a constructor and don't add or change anything. You can remove some of that code and focus on the essence of your library. This way it might gain more supporters and contributors.

Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by adlawson on Sunday July 06, 2014 @02:39PM (#7995258)
I absolutely agree with you about applications using their own DI/IOC implementations.

The registry in this library, however, isn't meant to be a registry used outside of the internals of the library. It's an unfortunate side effect of trying to marry up object instances with PHPs static stream wrapper API.

Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by PeterGriffin on Sunday July 06, 2014 @03:27PM (#7995393)
Oh I see.

I wish PHP had visibility for classes, oh well.

Do you know what I do, I put everything that's not meant to be used by "the public" in sub-namespace "Internal". So, say "Vendor\Project\..." for public classes and "Vendor\Project\Internal\..." for volatile internal matters.

This means there's no confusion about what people should use, and what's just the guts of the system they shouldn't mess with.

Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by Gigablah on Sunday July 06, 2014 @11:28PM (#7996886)
I personally think it's neater to mark the class with an @internal PHPDoc tag rather than add a sub-namespace.

http://phpdoc.org/docs/latest/references/phpdoc/tags/interna...

Re:Show HN: Virtual File System in PHP by PeterGriffin on Monday July 07, 2014 @04:51AM (#7997785)
It's an option, and it sure is neater to those creating the library, but it's much less neater to those using it. Not everyone compiles a PHPDoc for themselves when downloading a library, so then all classes form a nice big pile at the root namespace.

In terms of neatness and ease of use, I choose like I'd choose how to optimize code - I focus on the parts that get most use. Users of a library are hopefully way more than its maintainers, so it feels like it's worth slightly inconveniencing the maintainers in order to have an instantly clear public interface.