Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Building a New PHP Reflection Library

James Titcumb

Thursday 17 November 2016 from 20:00 to 21:00

Talk in English - UK at Nomad PHP November 2016 EU
View Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/asgrim1/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-building-a-new-php-reflection-library-nomad-php-eu-2016
Short URL: https://joind.in/talk/c88ea (QR-Code (opens in new window))

Avg. Rating

Have you ever used PHP’s built in reflection, only to find you can’t do quite what you wanted? What about finding types for parameters or properties? What about reflecting on classes that aren’t loaded, so that you can modify them directly?

Better Reflection is an awesome new library that uses magical time-warp techniques* to improve on PHP’s built-in reflection by providing additional functionality. In this talk we’ll cover what reflection is all about, explore the cool features of Better Reflection already implemented, the difficulties we faced actually writing the thing, and how you can use Better Reflection in your projects to maximise your reflection-fu.

(*actual magic or time-warp not guaranteed)

Comments

Comments are closed.

Michael Roderick at 04:05 on 18 Nov 2016

I have never been in a situation where I used reflection to solve a problem, but your talk made me want to. I thought working through some of your problem solving and process of development for this library was very interesting, even if I'll need to look over it again to really process everything. Thanks for a great presentation!

Bart Reunes at 14:48 on 21 Nov 2016

Interesting talk. Looking into it as an option to "unparse" classes, although I'm not sure yet if this would be the right fit. Surely amazing to see how you are working with other libraries to make the whole environment better, and how some strange problems would come up one would not think about when starting a library like this.
I would have liked some more examples on how to use this in some more complex use cases, but I guess I'm going to dive into it to experience it some more. Kudos!

---

Addressed to Nomad PHP/Cal:

As this was brought as an online video, the slides missed some more information, and it felt more like a podcast than a video cast. Sometimes one is looking quite some time to a certain slide. Gifs simply don't work. Might be interesting to add that to the guidelines for future speakers, as I'm completely sure this slideshow would work perfectly fine for an irl meetup. Also, the video seems to be out of sync, sound is coming in quite some seconds after the video.