Wednesday, 28 February 2007

Gopal's Hidef in PECL

Gopal Vijayaraghavan, in a new post over his blog, talks about his first PHP extension, Hidef with all the memory leaks fixed and new features added. He says, Hidef, as it was known acquires a new and improved slogan ‘Constants for real’ as well as a place in the PECL packages.

To install the module, he instructs to run this simple command and have the binary built and dropped into your PHP install— except for the extension=hidef.so line. The command is as follows:

bash# pecl install "channel://pecl.php.net/hidef-0.1.0"

Pierre Alain Joye gives you some more inputs in his blog. He says, this extension let’s you define your constants in a ini-like file, PHP will then parse this file and defines the constants during the PHP startup which happens only when you start your web server. It simply drops all performance impacts introduced by the constants definition. If you are a performance freak, this extension is for you, he advises.