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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] New Standardized HTTP Interface
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 10/30/14, 1:23 PM, Sherif Ramadan wrote:
> Hello Internals,
>
> I've been meaning to write up a full-blown RFC for introducing a new
> standardized HTTP interface for PHP core for some time now. I figure now
> with PHP 7 on the road map this might be a good time to start this
> discussion since it involves breaking some backwards compatibility that may
> have been out of the question in PHP 5.

*snip*

> I'm in the process of writing up a cleaner implementation to introduce in
> the RFC, but in the mean time I'd like to open up to discussion and see
> what others think or how they feel we might approach this problem more
> cleanly.
>
> Thanks,
> Sherif

As you note, there's an enormous amount of existing and active 
discussion around PSR-7 on the FIG mailing list, and I would urge anyone 
pursuing such an effort for core to read through that discussion in 
detail.  There are a lot of tricky bits that we have been hashing 
through that you don't want to hash through again, especially around 
supported use cases.

In practice, honestly, I think userspace can experiment and innovate 
here better than internals can, at least for a while.  The main place 
where core could help would be streams.  One of the things we're still 
struggling with is supporting message bodies (request or response) that 
can be strings OR a stream, such as a file off disk that we don't want 
in memory all at once, OR a callable that generates output on the fly 
(say, reading records out of a DB and generating a CSV file).

Part of the problem is that the native streams API, while powerful, is 
horribly annoying to work with.  Michael Dowling has documented many of 
the issues with it from a request/response perspective here:

http://mtdowling.com/blog/2014/07/03/a-case-for-higher-level-php-streams/

Honestly, I think one of the best things internals could do to help 
really robust request/response support for PHP 7 isn't writing a new 
interface, but improving the streams API in order to simplify the many 
use cases we've identified (and render the whole "detach" stuff we're 
looking at now unnecessary).

--Larry Garfield