A meta program is a program, which has other programs or even itself as its application domain. This technique is commonly used to implement advanced software development tools and frameworks. PHP is one of the most popular programming languages for web applications ...

The programming language in focus of this paper will be PHP, which is one of the most popular programming languages for web applications. Like many other languages PHP provides a set of meta programming and reï¬ ection facilities. This paper gives an overview of these capabilities and discusses stregnths and weaknesses of their implementation. In our earlier work we already developed.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: In the following section, the dynamic scripting language PHP is presented. This includes its history, do- mains of application, and also its special features in section 2.2. Then, in the context of meta programming, the basic reï¬ ection features, such as the histori- cally grown procedural API and its object-oriented reï¬ ection API, are presented in section 3.1. Here, the design decisions taken to build the object-oriented part in its own subsystem are emphasized. Afterward, a short overview about the com- mon usage of reï¬ ection in the PHP community is given. Section 3.3 introduces our implementation of an annotation mechanism, which is one of the common use cases the reï¬ ection API is used for. The main contribution of our current work is presented in section 3.4. It is a prototype of a class browser utilizing the PHPâ s reï¬ ection capabilities to its limits. How intercession is possible in PHP is shown in section 4.1, including the presentation of the Runkit extension and some further extensions for meta programming in general.

In modern programming languages a typical way to obtain structural information is to leverage the runtime environment of the language and access language elements through a high level reï¬ ection API.
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Source: instantsvc.sourceforge.net