In his latest post Michael Dowling looks at a recently proposed PSR standard (the HTTP message one, created by him) and some of his thoughts around it and what it could do for the community.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the PSR HTTP message proposal, PSR-7. The purpose of the proposal is to create a shared interface that can be used by projects to interact with HTTP messages for both clients and servers. When I created the proposal, I envisioned the purpose is not to say projects that utilize HTTP messages need to make breaking changes to use the proposed interfaces, but rather give projects an interface for which they can create an adapter.

He points out that the major part of the proposal that's being debated is the message body methods and structure. He gives a quick overview of this API and how streams could fit in with it, providing a flexible abstraction layer over the actual data. He includes a few ideas for some functionality that could make streams work relatively easily with the proposal (using a StreamInterface):

• No Auto-registering of stream protocols and filters
• Exceptions cause warnings in stream wrappers and filters
• Functionality is spread over many functions

He also shares an example (based around the Guzzle HTTP library) showing how this interface could be put to work. He also talks some about one of the major concerns voiced right now, getting the actual stream itself to work with, and shows how the "detach" method matches this goal.