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In just a few years PHP has rapidly evolved from a small niche language to a powerful web development tool. Now in use on over 14 million Web sites, PHP is more stable and extensible than ever. However, there is no documentation on how to extend PHP; developers seeking to build PHP extensions and increase the performance and functionality of their PHP applications are left to word of mouth and muddling through PHP internals without systematic, helpful guidance. Although the basics of extension writing are fairly easy to grasp, the more advanced features have a tougher learning curve that can be very difficult to overcome. This is common at any moderate to high-traffic site, forcing the company hire talented, and high-priced, developers to increase performance. With Extending and Embedding PHP, Sara Golemon makes writing extensions within the grasp of every PHP developer, while guiding the reader through the tricky internals of PHP.
Introduction 1
1 The PHP Life Cycle 9
2 Variables from the Inside Out 23
3 Memory Management 35
4 Setting Up a Build Environment 47
5 Your First Extension 55
6 Returning Values 67
7 Accepting Parameters 79
8 Working with Arrays and Hash Tables 89
9 The Resource Data Type 113
10 PHP4 Objects 131
11 PHP5 Objects 143
12 Startup, Shutdown, and a Few Points in Between 159
13 INI Settings 175
14 Accessing Streams 183
15 Implementing Streams 199
16 Diverting the Stream 221
17 Configuration and Linking 235
18 Extension Generators 245
19 Setting Up a Host Environment 253
20 Advanced Embedding 261
A ZendAPI Reference 275
B PHPAPI Reference 305
C Extending and Embedding Cookbook 351
D Additional Resources 365
Index 371