AmsterdamPHP Monthly Meeting - May/2018
17 May 2018 at Werkspot

"Transpilers are language-to-language compilers that we frequently see in the JavaScript community. However, we do not mention transpilers in the PHP world that often. Why are they not as popular in PHP as they are with JavaScript? Are they any good? In order to investigate this I took a number of frequently used concepts from the PHP world and put them together into the syntax of a language that I called Glagol DSL. The idea is simple - grab frequently used patterns and put them into the language's grammar. In general, the focus of this research is to bring some of the fundamental building blocks of Domain-Driven Design (such as entities, value objects and repositories) into Glagol's syntax. By doing that developers circumvent unnecessary boilerplate and avoid basic conceptual DDD code-related mistakes. At the very end, we get models comprised of greatly reduced codebase volumes, with a built-in DDD-like structuring. Last but not least, runtime is PHP! "