Now it seems to be a good time to philosophize about the future language development of PHP again. To promote this discussion, I backported my Traits-patch to PHP 5.3, fixed some bugs, and used GitHub to publish it. Lets hope that this will allow a painless maintenance of the patch.

For the moment, there is no uptodate standalone patch file anymore, but only the GitHub repository.

• PHP 6: http://github.com/gron/php-src/tree/PHP_6-traits
• PHP 5.3: http://github.com/gron/php-src/tree/PHP_5_3-traits

For a basic introduction please refer to the RFC (http://wiki.php.net/rfc/horizontalreuse) and the test cases available in the source folder Zend/tests/traits.

In its current version, it implements the RFC with the proposed syntax and functionality. There are still some parts missing for a complete integration into the PHP landscape. Most noticeable is the lack of reflection support at the moment. I will add it, when the patch has reached a level of stability to be included in the official language.

For testing purpose, you can use the following patch, archive with test cases.

The patch is build for cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout php6. More information on how to build the PHP source from CVS is available at php.net.

Patch:

• traits.patch
• Test Cases

In case of any problems applying the patch on the CVS checkout, you can use this code snapshot with traits: php6-traits.tar.bz2