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Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:02:22 +0100
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Subject: Moving Socket extension to PECL
From: maurice@iceblog.de (Maurice)

Hi there,

unfortunately I haven't read your comments some months ago on moving the 
Socket extension to PECL. I just stumbled upon it yesterday while 
surfing around on Sara's blog (btw, great book!) and was quite upset 
about it...

I've written a multiplexing connection suite in PHP5 (LGPL, but not yet 
released) that relies on the Socket extension. What it does? Well, 
multiplexing asynchronous TCP/UDP connections using socket_select.

In my first tests I also included support for streams (using 
stream_select) in order to support SSL/TLS enabled connections. However, 
the SSL transport layer in the Stream "extension" is totally screwed up 
if you use asynchronous socket streams. I know that it is not the 
easiest thing to implement asynchronous SSL, but the main problem with 
streams is that the easy-to-use interface is not really suitable for 
complex things like async. SSL (for those involed: SSL_read may as also 
write to the connection and SSL_write may also read from it. This logic 
might be implemented in stream_select, but therefore the stream 
read/write functions must be a little bit more specific about what 
happend (SSL_get_error)).

That's why I started extending the socket extension with socket_ssl_* 
functions that use the openssl extension (and thus are only available if 
PHP is compiled with openssl support). I will provide a patch for that 
once it's complete and out of beta status.

In my opinion one should rather move the stream_socket functionality to 
the Socket extension (and maybe add a function like 
stream_create_from_socket()) then moving the Socket extension to PECL.

Anyway, the Stream-SSL part has to be fixed _before_ moving the socket 
extension to PECL.

Maurice.