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Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:00:44 -0600
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP 5.4 - Meta attribute (aka. Annotations) support
 discussion
From: larry@garfieldtech.com ("larry@garfieldtech.com")

On 11/18/10 7:34 AM, guilhermeblanco@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi Larry,
>
> For existent project examples and usage, here are 2 links of the
> upcoming versions of Doctrine 2 and Symfony 2:
>
> http://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/orm/2.0/docs/reference/basic-mapping/en#introduction-to-docblock-annotations
> http://docs.symfony-reloaded.org/guides/validator.html
>
> Please understand that Roman, Benjamin, Jonathan and I wrote this
> Annotation parser for Doctrine, which was reused by Bernhard on
> Symfony.
> So I have clean understanding of the issue we have on hands and every
> single point that it is required to address. That's why I wrote the
> RFC.
>
> Yesterday night a couple of people joined on #php.pecl and discussed a
> possible new implementation.
> I'll write what was discussed and probably some sample code.

No offense, but as I've noted before Symfony and Doctrine are very very 
different types of frameworks/libraries than a lot of the code out 
there.  Much of what may make sense in a component framework doesn't 
make sense in a full stack framework (e.g., Drupal, which I work on) and 
vice versa.  So while I respect that you put a lot of work into the 
Doctrine and Symfony implementations that does not mean you will 
understand "every single point that it is required to address".

That said, from looking at the Symfony page above it looks like it's an 
integrated system for providing variable-level validation.  True?

If that's the case, what would a before/after look like for code using 
annotations vs. not?

As far as implementation goes, for something like this to be useful for 
a highly-dynamic system like Drupal we'd need to be able to add 
annotations/validation rules out-of-band, that is, from somewhere other 
than syntactically right on the variable/function/method being 
validated.  We frequently have highly-generic objects that get used in a 
multitude of different ways, so we would need to be able to associate 
validation rules at runtime for them to work.

Naturally the error messages from them would also need to be 
returned/thrown, not printed, so an application can take proper steps 
with them in its own error handling routines.

--Larry Garfield