PHP_Archive gains maturity

Thursday, April 7. 2005

Well, I just spent 20 minutes typing an entry, and a little hit of the backspace key, and ***ing Firefox deleted the whole thing. Here's an abridged version.

After writing This entry I've spent some time hacking on Davey Shafik's PHP_Archive, and to my amazement, have managed to fix every major issue that I could think of!

Now, .phar can truly be self-contained archives - no dependencies at all, so that shrink-wrapped applications can be distributed in a single file and run with

$ php app.phar

or in a web browser by associating .phar with php the same way you associate .php

The major issues Davey had not been able to fix were with gzipping to make compressed .phars. I took a look at Vincent Lascaux's excellent File_Archive package and realized that by adding only a few lines of code, I could completely fix the gz problem, and better yet, eliminate the runtime dependency on Archive_Tar. Replacing that huge file with only 40 lines of code also meant that PEAR.php went byebye - can we say significant speedup

In fact, solving these issues was so straightforward, I decided to tackle my one remaining feature request: allowing multiple phars in the same script, so that you could do:

require_once 'Calendar.phar';
require_once 'Logger.phar';
require_once 'phar://Calendar.phar/Calendar/Arabic.php';
require_once 'phar://Logger.phar/Logger/Mail.php';

This is instead of the default:

require_once 'Calendar.php';
require_once 'phar://Calendar/Arabic.php';

which also works just fine. If no .phar is present at the beginning, then it will just look in the most recently opened .phar.

Some potential issues:

speed - anything written in PHP will be slower
everything must be named .phar to use the new syntax - there's no way around this, unless we make PHP_Archive far too complicated for its own good. The best solution if you need another extension is to hack PHP_Archive for your personal .phar.

In the end, it's pretty goddam cool, and will make it possible to distribute PEAR's installer as a single file containing everything one needs - FINALLY!

Posted by Greg Beaver in PEAR at 22:07 | Comments (4) | Trackback (1)

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Comments

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Wow, this is so nice. It would be cool combined with WinBinder.
Thank you!

#1 Emil Tamas (Homepage) on 2005-04-07 23:32 (Reply)

Sounds really nice!

#2 Christian Dickmann (Homepage) on 2005-04-08 00:24 (Reply)

Sounds great. Where can we download it?

#3 Evan Wired on 2005-04-08 08:55 (Reply)

right now only from a cvs checkout. There are a few holes in the code (can only add individual files, for instance), and no unit tests. I don't think it's wise to release this until we can be sure that both edge cases and errors work properly.

Fortunately, the package is really simple - tests need not be like PEAR (635 and counting)

#3.1 Greg Beaver (Homepage) on 2005-04-09 06:07 (Reply)

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