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Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 11:33:37 -0400
To: "PHP internals" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: RFC: adding a callback for determining if a method is static
From: kingwez@gmail.com ("Wez Furlong")

Hello,

This weekend I've been building an Objective-C runtime bridge for PHP.
This is somewhat like the COM extension in that it is possible to
dynamically interrogate the Objective-C runtime to determine all the
interfaces (known as protocols) and classes and map those into PHP.
(it's also possible to go the other way, but that's not relevant to my
topic here).

Now, Objective-C allows one to enumerate static methods defined on
interfaces, but not in classes.  Furthermore, there is something
vaguely akin to our __call mechanism that allows classes and instances
to magically handle methods without explicitly defining them in the
class description.

What I'd like to be able to do is this:

  $NSApp = NSApplication::sharedApplication();

but the sharedApplication() static method doesn't appear in the
enumerated list of methods in the runtime, so I can't simply add it to
my function table when I register the NSApplication class.

So what I need to do is this to work around the issue:

  $NSApp = NSApplication::__staticInvoke('sharedApplication');

This can ask the runtime if "sharedApplication" is a static method and
invoke it appropriately.

This wouldn't be especially bad if it was only for one or two classes
that were no often used, but it crops up a lot.

I'd like to see an additional callback in the zend_class_entry that
operates similarly to the existing get_method callback, but that takes
the zend_class_entry instead of the object pointer as its parameter.
That would enable more natural syntax for this application, and likely
other bridging extensions too.

Thoughts?

--Wez.