The PHP-GTK Community Site has posted some information (and some files) to help make your editor of choice a bit more "PHP-GTK aware" when it comes to code completion.

These IDEs are able to provide code completion not only for prebuilt extension code, but also for user-level PHP code. This gives us a way to provide it to PHP-GTK developers : all it takes is a "stub" file containing PHP declarations equivalent to the PHP-GTK2 classes, interfaces, and their methods and constants.

Making it by hand would be slow (and not efficient at all) so they opted to let the Reflection API do the heavy lifting for them and generate a Gtk_Dumper output file to hand to your editor and let it parse. The file is available for download.

Tobias Schlitt has posted a handy tip about using the Reflection API in PHP5 - specifically its accessing of private properties in a class.

I recently stumbled over reflecting private properties in PHP again. As you might know, this was not possible until now and if you tried this [code] PHP thanked it to you with this [error that is cannot access a non-public member].

He notes that, while the behaviour is correct, it still makes things like metaprogramming impossible. So, what's a developer to do? Patch it of course! Tobias and Derick Rethans persuaded two other developers (Derick and Marcus Borger) to include a patch that allows the Reflection API to see these private variables.

To make it work, you have to use the setAccessible method on the Reflection object to set which of the properties you want to be able to get at.

On the Stubbles blog, Frank Kleine offers some advice to developers looking to use the Reflection API - "don't trust it".

If you try to get informations about parameters from methods of internal classes - forget that. Examining several internal classes my key findings are: either there is no information about parameters available and the reflection API says the method does not have any parameters, or the information about the parameter is wrong.

He includes code examples along side the output from the script to illustrate his point.

The Stubbles framework team has released the latest version of their framework today - Stubbles 0.1.0:

The Stubbles team is proud to announce the release of Stubbles 0.1.0. This release is a first alpha version and contains the basic features of Stubbles like the Extended Reflection API, XML handling with XMLStreamWriter and XMLSerializer, Logging, Event handling, support for filtering and validating user input and session handling. The release additionally contains parts of packages that we announced to be in the next milestone 0.2.0.

The Stubbles framework is one that seeks to "combine your favorite features from other programming languages and frameworks" and is flexible enough to allow for easy interfacing with other frameworks/components like PEAR or the Zend Framework.