Metadata/Attributes in PHP
There’s a ton of stuff I miss from C#, having moved to PHP. Did I say a ton? I meant a megaton.
One of the things I miss the most (besides the sanity) are attributes (annotations for Java peeps). To be able to ascribe metadata to class, method and property definitions opens up a whole new world of introspection which enables you to do some pretty wicked hacks.
In this post, I present a PHP class that allows you to do metadata/attribute programming with PHP. You can download the class here. But before we dig in, we must understand what attributes are and how they are useful…