Annotations in PHP

Sebastian Bergmann » 19 April 2005 » in PHP » 4 Comments

Yesterday someone proposed adding support for annotations to the PHP Interpreter. Although it would be nice to have this kind of functionality out-of-the-box and built into the interpreter itself this is not necessary.

I could not resist and started working on a package that exends the Reflection API of PHP 5 by adding getAnnotations(), getAnnotation($name), and hasAnnotation($name) methods to ReflectionClass, ReflectionFunction, ReflectionMethod, and ReflectionProperty.

The syntax for annotations follows the standard for PHP Doc Comments and @foo bar declares an annotation of name "foo" with value "bar".

The inital code can be found here:

A usage example can be found here.

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4 Comments to "Annotations in PHP"

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David
19/04/2005 at 09:52 Permalink

I created a slightly different annotation implementation just a week ago (on an extension from the reflection classes, that allows for getDocComment() for properties). It works like this:

/*
* @SomeClass(a=>"B", b => 3, c => true)
*/

$extendedReflectionProperty->getAnnotation("SomeClass");

and returns an instance of SomeClass with the appropriate properties set (a,b,c). I'll send you my code / a patch when I get back home.
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Brenden Vickery
20/04/2005 at 23:41 Permalink

Ive also done some work on annotation processing for an ORM Im working on. If you check the code out of cvs http://sourceforge.net/projects/perdure/, its in the tools/classes/ directory.

That code parses annotations that are closer to the java spec:
/**
*@Annotation(value=param-value)
*/

I would rather see annotation support in the php interpreter so that we dont need to put the annotations in a docblock. Something closer to the way java is going.
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dgx
04/10/2006 at 10:24 Permalink

It seems that Zend Encoder (Zend Guard) discards ReflectionProperty::getDocComment(), even option --preserve-docs is enabled :-(
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Antoine
11/11/2008 at 10:50 Permalink

Hi,

is it still possible to get the code of your implementation? Just to have a look on how is it possible to do it.

Antoine C.
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3 Trackbacks to "Annotations in PHP"

p0t 20/04/2005 at 04:44

Annotations in PHP - Sebastian Bergmann ...
Sebastian Bergmann 21/09/2006 at 11:48

The Extended Reflection API enhances PHP 5 by providing access to type information and annotations that are embedded as doc-comments into the sourcecode. Processable additions to the source code enable a wide range of new applications in general, and W
Stubblog 10/11/2008 at 16:49

Annotations are a really helpful feature in present-day development. An annotation is a special form of syntactic metadata that can be added to source code elements such as classes, methods, properties and parameters. They do not affect the program semant

Sebastian Bergmann