Sebastian Bergmann

William Candillon, the Google Summer of Code student that I mentored last summer, has released a first version of the new phpAspect code base.

phpAspect is an extension to the PHP programming language that implements Aspect-Oriented Programming. The phpAspect compiler weaves aspects implementing crosscutting concerns into PHP source code. The weaving process is static (before source code execution) and uses William's parse_tree extension that provides access to the parse tree of PHP source code. The woven PHP source code can be executed with any PHP 5 version.

Over the summer I had the honour of participating in the Google Summer of Code as a mentor, on behalf of the PHP Project, for William Candillon.

The project that William undertook was to "[write] a new version of PHPAspect [...] in C and using XSLT to perform source code transformation".

One of the results of William's work that I am particularly happy with is the fact that he developed the parse_tree extension as part of his work. This extension gives PHP developers access to the parse tree of PHP source code. This way this essential part of his PHPAspect project is reusable for other purposes.

To learn more about PHPAspect you can refer to William's slides from his recent presentation at L'École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

For a first use case of the parse_tree extensions outside the context of PHPAspect look at William's work on visualizing PHP parse trees.