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Strategy for developing namespaced and non-namespaced versions of same PHP code

Asked 2009-12-02T22:41:35.040
50

I'm maintaining library written for PHP 5.2 and I'd like to create PHP 5.3-namespaced version of it. However, I'd also keep non-namespaced version up to date until PHP 5.3 becomes so old, that even Debian stable ships it ;)

I've got rather clean code, about 80 classes following Project_Directory_Filename naming scheme (I'd change them to \Project\Directory\Filename of course) and only few functions and constants (also prefixed with project name).

Question is: what's the best way to develop namespaced and non-namespaced versions in parallel?

  • Should I just create fork in repository and keep merging changes between branches? Are there cases where backslash-sprinkled code becomes hard to merge?

  • Should I write script that converts 5.2 version to 5.3 or vice-versa? Should I use PHP tokenizer? sed? C preprocessor?

  • Is there a better way to use namespaces where available and keep backwards compatibility with older PHP?

Update: Decided against use of namespaces after all.

php namespaces migration compatibility
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1 Answer

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Well, I don't know if it is the "best" way, but in theory, you could use a script to take your 5.3 migrate code and backport it into 5.2 (potentially even using PHP).

On your namespace files you would want to do something convert:

namespace \Project\Directory\Filename;

class MyClass {
  public $attribute;

  public function typedFunction(MyClass $child) {
    if ($child instanceof MyClass) {
      print 'Is MyClass';
    }
  }
}

To something like:

class Project_Directory_Filename_MyClass {
  public $attribute;

  public function typedFunction(Project_Directory_Filename_MyClass $child) {
    if ($child instanceof Project_Directory_Filename_MyClass) {
      print 'Is MyClass';
    }
  }
}

And in your namespace code you would need to convert from:

$myobject = new Project\Directory\Filename\MyClass();

To:

$myobject = new Project_Directory_Filename_MyClass();

While all your includes and requires would stay the same, I think you would almost need to keep some sort of Cache of all your classes and namespace to do the complex conversion around the 'instanceof' and typed parameters if you use them. That is the trickiest thing I can see.

answered 2009-12-28T11:50:45.530

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