On the SitePoint PHP blog today Taylor Ren continues his look at using the PHP-CPP library to help build custom extensions. In this latest post he sheds some light on some more advanced topics.

In my earlier articles, I have introduced the PHP-CPP lib to create an extension for PHP using C++ (first article and second article). In the latter, I demonstrated a bit of the OO side of writing a PHP extension with a Complex class doing complex number manipulations. That introduction is not complete as the main focus of that article is more on the demonstration of the OO capability of PHP-CPP, not on the OO implementation details. In this article, we will further drill down the Complex lib development, adding more member functions, and addressing some advanced topics in writing a PHP extension with OO features using PHP-CPP

He breaks up the advanced topics into sections, providing code examples for each:

• Returning this pointer in C++
• Returning a Complex object pointer
• Exposing the __toString magical method
• Chaining member function calls
• Exception throwing and handling in PHP

With the code in place, he then shows how to test all of the new functions you've added with a bit of simple PHP code.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the second part of their look at the PHP-CPP tool and how to use it for developing PHP extensions. In this second part of the series Taylor Ren builds on what was learned in part one and talks more about the OOP features of the tool.

In this part, we further elaborate its OO features. We will mimic a complex number (in the form of 3+4i) class to demonstrate some more useful and powerful sides of the PHP-CPP library.

He walks you though a few changes to the environment files (the .ini configuration file and the Makefile) to set things up. He then gets into the C++/PHP constructor and getters and setters for private class variables, much like PHP's __get and __set. His example shows a set of methods that do some mathematical calculations including one to show the result in a "more friendly way". He includes the code for registering these functions and, finally, the steps to compile, install and test the extension.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new tutorial from Taylor Ren showing you how to get started with PHP-CPP for creating PHP extensions. PHP-CPP is a C++ library that makes it simpler (and faster) to create PHP-specific extensions.

In your dealings with PHP, you may come to consider writing a PHP extension yourself. [...] When it comes to choosing a tool to build PHP extensions, we see two different approaches: use more pro-PHP semantics, like Zephir or use more pro-C/C++ semantics, like PHP-CPP, which will be addressed in this article. For me, the main drive to select the second approach is simple: I started my programming hobby with C/C++, so I still feel more comfortable writing those lower level modules in C/C++. PHP-CPP’s official site gives a few other reasons to do so.

He walks you through the installation of the library (for now, just a git clone) and getting the needed environment set up to be able to compile and test out the extension. He helps you set up the "skeleton" files for the extension, including some sample content. He includes code for a typical "Hello World" example extension as well as its use in a sample PHP script.