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Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:07:17 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] File system watcher/monitoring
From: ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net ("Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa")

Hi Stas,

On 14/02/13 22:37, Stas Malyshev wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> A missing feature in PHP is a file system watcher/monitoring available=

>> for almost all platforms. On Linux, we have inotify (available in PHP
>> through pecl/inotify), on Mac OS X, we have /dev/fsevents (not availab=
le
>> in PHP, since we need ioctl to do that in pure PHP =E2=80=94and sudo=E2=
=80=94, no C
>> extension needed), on FreeBSD, we have FAM, and on Windows, we have
>> FileSystemWatcher in .NET. All major platforms have a solution ready t=
o use.
> I think it'd be great to have a library with unified interface and an
> extension that uses it. However, I'm not sure if these libraries are
> useful in common php use case - short-lived requests. Could I get the
> changes since the last request? Or is it useful only for long-running
> persistent processes?
It is only useful for long-running processes.

For example when you are writting tests: at each modifications, you=20
would like to re-run or re-generate tests. In this case, you have a=20
daemon that watches files changes and executes a command when needed.

Another more concrete example is with EventSource [1]. The browser=20
maintains opened a connection and the server writes on this connection=20
step-by-step (or=E2=80=A6 chunk-by-chunk since it uses the chunk feature =
of=20
HTTP1.1). It is very useful to develop some =E2=80=9Crealtime-tools=E2=80=
=9D. I made a=20
video [2] to illustrate (code is here [3]). This is very naive and not=20
optimized at all, but this is a short POC to show you an interesting=20
usecase.


>> Is it possible to have such a feature landing in PHP (core if karma
>> allows it)? or do you want such a feature?
> I'm not sure why it has to be in core though. I don't see so far
> anything that requires modifying language core.
The core integration was a joke, forget it ;-).


Regards.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/
[2] https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26317193/Realtime_edition.webm
[3] http://paste.hoa-project.net/9f15189c05ef0961d374fe7e6c70b3b2b27c8b64=


--=20
Ivan Enderlin
Developer of Hoa
http://hoa-project.net/

PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis)
http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/

Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C
http://w3.org/