Tuesday, 27 March 2007

Proposal for Zend_YAML Added

Pбdraic Brady in a post over his blog continues to discuss about YAML and how it can be used to support PHP. He first explains that YAML is a machine parsable data serialisation format for storing text, numerical data, arrays and more. It was designed for use with programming languages and has support in Python, Perl and Ruby. He further informs that several C implementations exist and at least one (Syck) supports a PHP extension.

He highlights the fact that PHP has been slow in adopting YAML. He says, its support is limited to the PHP Spyc Library and a PHP extension, which relies on the Syck C Library. He reasons out that it lacks visibility, as the PHP extension has no PECL presence. However, he claims that it is by far the fastest and more efficient YAML parser for PHP, which benefits from the fact that the Syck Library is standard in Ruby since 1.8, and available for Perl and Python.

He than tells you about the proposal that he has written for the Zend Framework. The proposal Zend_YAML consist of a general outline and some sample use cases. He talks about the reference parser. He informs you that Zend_YAML will take its cue from pyyaml with OO improvement and PHP 5.