WARNING: This might ony show off my lack of understanding of internal PHP. ;-)

Custom Startup Extension

This PHP extension assists the moving of typical PHP script startup routines and configuration data into a PHP extension (.so) where they are ready to be used (M INIT) before a web script is run (R INIT). This project was set up so that customizing the data need only be performed in one place even if they are needed in more than one file.

Features

Autoloader Data

Class autoloading with the project\get_autoload_file() function is 2%-15% faster than typical PHP autoloaders depending on PHP and framework version. Choose the class search paths in the makefile, compile, and use this code at the project entry point, i.e. index.php:

spl_autoload_register(function($class) {
    if ( $file = project\get_autoload_file($class) ) {
        include $file;
    }
});

Hard Coded Constants

Regular PHP "defines" can be compiled into the extension where they are ready to be used making it unnecessary to recreate them each time a script is run.

INI Namespace Constants

Aids in the creation of "php.ini" file values for retrieval with $v1 = ini_get('project.var1');. These are about seven times slower than the "defines" above but are useful when values need to be changed often and recompiling this extension is not convienent.

Requirements For Compiling

GCC, Make, and the standard libraries are required to build and install the custom extension, as is the PHP development libraries.

CentOS 6 requires at least devtoolset-2 to compile PHP-CPP.

 > cd /etc/yum.repos.d
 > wget http://people.centos.org/tru/devtools-2/devtools-2.repo
 > yum --enablerepo=testing-devtools-2-centos-6 install devtoolset-2-gcc devtoolset-2-gcc-c++
 > scl enable devtoolset-2 bash

PHP-CPP

The Copernica PHP-CPP library is used to build this extension.

 > make release
 > sudo make install

Just using make will create a slower debug version.