Phalanger - the PHP Language Compiler for .NET Framework
20 February 2006: Phalanger version 1.0 (final) has been released and is available for download. Several new native extensions are now supported by Phalanger (Calendar, ODBC, WinBinder). MySQL extension is fully managed and works with the latest versions of MySQL server. The final version also fixes many bugs and adds functions and features of PHP 5.1.2. See change log for details.
Whether you love or hate PHP, a lot of web applications have been built upon it's hack-of-a-hacked-hack foundation.
And they work.
Now they work on .NET.
Note: Thinking out-loud here, but given MS's big gigantic "we're not open source... but if you promise not to tell, here's a tool that you can use to view the .NET foundation class libraries source code, and even output it into any language which has a language driver... but you didn't hear that from us!" secret (okay, so its not so big of a secret :) -- coupled with some of the excellent C# code refactoring tools that exist, its seems to me its only a matter of time before someone puts two-and-two together and builds a PHP driver for Reflector that would then allow for a somewhat backa$$ward approach to creating a PHP code refactoring tool that will take spaghetti PHP and turn it into something more Lasagna-ish, or some other pasta dish that appears to have been built using a much more systematic layering approach.
But again, just thinking out-loud here. ;)
[UPDATE: You know that PHP stands for "Personal" and not "Professional" "Home Page" right?
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You know that PHP hasn’t stood for that in years, and that the correct expansion of PHP is ‘PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor’ right?
Hey Joseph,
No, I didn’t know that. Actually, my point for bringing this up probably sounded like a slam of the language, but in reality it was meant to showcase the roots of the project, and to try and showcase the fact that the original purpose of PHP was to act as a toolset for Personal Home Pages, and because of this it attracted a HUGE base of power users in the early days. This of course drove the project to become better, faster, bigger, etc… as this generation of hackers (a group I pre-date by only a couple of years) have now become a primary force in the workplace. The result, of course, is a HUGE base of PHP code developed by folks who prefer PHP because they understand it best.
What this all boils down to is that the folks who are bitchin’ and moanin’ about how bad PHP is in terms of modularity, etc… are wasting their bitchin’ and moanin’. PHP ISN’T going anywhere, nor should it. It seems to me the next generation of PHP will probably see a fairly heavy push from the agile development world looking to cash in on a base of PHP code that, I would guess anyway, expands far beyond both .NET and Java — quite possibly combined (although thats probably pushing the stats a little too hard).
I think Phalanger is GREAT in this respect. It provides a FANTASTIC way to get this same base of PHP into CIL and from CIL this can be brought into whatever language they might want to then really extend this MASSIVE code base into something thats modular, extensible, agile, and FAST AS HELL!
All good things :)
Thanks for the info!