php-JMSParser

Library for writing recursive-descent parsers.

php-Metadata

This library provides some commonly needed base classes for managing metadata for classes, methods and properties. The metadata can come from many different sources (annotations, YAML/XML/PHP configuration files).

The metadata classes are used to abstract away that source and provide a common interface for all of them.

php-PhpCollection

This library adds basic collections for PHP.

Collections can be seen as more specialized arrays for which certain contracts are guaranteed.

Supported Collections:

• Sequences
  • Keys: numerical, consequentially increasing, no gaps
  • Values: anything, duplicates allowed
  • Classes: Sequence, SortedSequence
• Maps
  • Keys: strings or objects, duplicate keys not allowed
  • Values: anything, duplicates allowed
  • Classes: Map, ObjectMap (not yet implemented)
• Sets (not yet implemented)
  • Keys: not meaningful
  • Values: anything, each value must be unique (===)
  • Classes: Set

General Characteristics:

• Collections are mutable (new elements may be added, existing elements may be modified or removed). Specialized immutable versions may be added in the future though.
• Equality comparison between elements are always performed using the shallow comparison operator (===).
• Sorting algorithms are unstable, that means the order for equal elements is undefined (the default, and only PHP behavior).

php-PhpOption

This package adds an Option type for PHP.

The Option type is intended for cases where you sometimes might return a value (typically an object), and sometimes you might return no value (typically null) depending on arguments, or other runtime factors.

Often times, you forget to handle the case where no value is returned. Not intentionally of course, but maybe you did not account for all possible states of the system; or maybe you indeed covered all cases, then time goes on, code is refactored, some of these your checks might become invalid, or incomplete. Suddenly, without noticing, the no value case is not handled anymore. As a result, you might sometimes get fatal PHP errors telling you that you called a method on a non-object; users might see blank pages, or worse.

On one hand, the Option type forces a developer to consciously think about both cases (returning a value, or returning no value). That in itself will already make your code more robust. On the other hand, the Option type also allows the API developer to provide more concise API methods, and empowers the API user in how he consumes these methods.