On Thursday evening, I attended George Schlossnage's Work-in-Progress talk on Apache_Hooks, a project to allow PHP access the various request phases of Apache. George is actually an accomplished mod_perl and PHP hacker. So he got involved with this project (originally conceived by Rasmus) to try and level the playing field a bit between PHP and mod_perl.
To provide a bit of context, imagine being able to write an Apache authentication handler in PHP that could then let control pass on to a mod_perl content handler.
Apache_Hooks is still very experimental but it seems to work reasonably well. It's in a separate branch of the PHP CVS repository for now. Nobody know if or when it'll become mainstream, but it is very cool stuff. It sounds like a few folks were interested enough to try running it in production.
I have a copy of his presentation, but I'm sure he'll have one on-line soon. Check the PHPCon web site in a week or two. We're trying to gather all the presentation links there.
This WiP also demonstrated the power of wireless networking in an amusing way. George was having trouble with the projector because his newer TiBook doesn't have a standard VGA out plug and he forgot the adaptor for it. Nobody else had one either. We puzzled over what to do until someone realize that 5 or 6 of the 10 of us in the room all had laptops with 802.11b cards and VGA out. So we setup an ad-hoc wireless network and FTP'd the slides from George's machine.
Update: As George notes, his Apache Hooks talk is now on-line.
Posted by jzawodn at October 28, 2002 03:33 PM
Apache hooks is now in the HEAD branch of php as the apache_hooks SAPI. If you're using HEAD, or a recent snap, you can ./configure --with-apache_hooks=/path/to/apxs
