Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:5491
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
To: internals@lists.php.net
Message-ID: <3FB75ECD.4000703@cschneid.com>
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 12:26:05 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031009
MIME-Version: 1.0
CC: php@mahono.de
References: <3F47BEA9.6000105@mahono.de>
In-Reply-To: <3F47BEA9.6000105@mahono.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: feature request: user-defined superglobals
From: cschneid@cschneid.com (Christian Schneider)

Matthias Nothhaft wrote:
> declare_superglobal($_MYVAR);

Has one single superglobal $_APP (or $_USER or the like) already been 
discussed? (Sorry Andi, couldn't find it in this list and didn't find 
the 'engine2' list you were referencing at all).

I second Matthias that some sort of user-controlled superglobal would be 
useful in frameworks, even if it was only one.

Stefan Walk wrote:
 > global $_MYFW;

I consider global the worst option ever as is has to be repeated inside 
every function. Redundant and bug prone.

$GLOBALS['_MYFW'] is a bit better but very ugly and a pain to use.

Timm Friebe wrote:
 > MYFW::getInstance()->method_a();

Very clumsy. There's a reason why I'm not using Java! (-:C
And no, it does _not_ work with PHP4 and excuse me, but PHP5 is far from 
being deployed at your friendly ISP. Don't fool yourselves, PHP4 will be 
around (and has to be supported by people writing PHP frameworks) for 
quite a while.

An $_APP superglobal wouldn't allow multiple frameworks to coexist but I 
  think there'd be enough uses to justify it.

It'd for example allow me to turn $_REQUEST into an object, i.e. I could 
use $_APP->id instead of $_REQUEST['id'] which is so much nicer to use. 
And no, I don't use form variables with names that aren't valid PHP 
identifiers ;-). The abuse of $_SESSION for this was already condemned 
and I'd be uncomfortable to use $_REQUEST (or one of it's siblings) itself.

Ok, ready to take the beating,
- Chris