Problems and Limitations of Objective-PHP

Problem: PHP/Objective-PHP Syntax Conflicts

Unfortunately there is a syntactic conflict with PHP (see the Tokenizer page for more details).

Limitation: Timers in PHP

One of the stumbling points of PHP as a general purpose programming language is the lack of a timing system (real-time functionality).

In PHP timing can be achieved through polling the system time (microsecond accuracy) at given ‘ticks’ where a tick is the execution of 1 PHP instruction. Ie after a certain number of instructions are executed a method can be called to check the time and update or fire any timers.

However its not hard to see that this is far from ideal. You must trade off accuracy for performance (as for high accuracy of timer time outs the poll method must constantly fire hence slowing the overall script execution time).

I really hope this is addressed in the future but its unlikely.

However there are many applications where accurate timing is not necessary (e.g. in a website MVC backend) so this may not be a problem for most target applications).

Limitation: Lack of Type Bridging

In Obj-J Javascript types are toll-free bridged to Cappuccino equivalents. Unfortunately in PHP the native types are not objects (in this sense PHP is much less OO than JS) and so such simple toll-free bridging is not possible. In this sense Moka is more like Cocoa than Cappuccino.

Document status: INCOMPLETE for current version.