Alfresco Devs: Is the PHP API finished/paused/dead!?

[dwilson]

Sorry for the sensational topic, but I wanted to get some feedback from Alfresco on this.  Here are some of my concerns:

Documentation:  In the Wiki documentation I see several intended headings relating to the PHP section with incomplete documents.  (actually this isn't just in the PHP section, but all over the Wiki) Another example is Tutorial Five doesn't exist yet but was clearly intended.  Potential tutorials 6+ with many more examples would also be very helpful!  Uploading files, modifying associations, child associations, etc.  I see numerous posts about improving the wiki or uploading examples but then it seems like this project was just dropped suddenly.

I have Jeff Potts' excellent Alfresco Developer Guide though there is only one PHP example there- it's very hard to find information on Alfresco's PHP API at all, and the activity level in the "PHP Library" forum is a touch disappointing…  

Also, http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads/nightly/dist/ doesn't seem to contain "alfresco-php-library-X.Y.0.tar.gz" for example, yet in old posts it was hinted to be there.  (phpIntegration.amp only seems to contain java-php integration, tests, and examples.)

Lastly, the latest API I can find, alfresco-php-library-2.1.0.tar.gz, contains this in the actual release code despite the wiki API doc having no mention of this problem-  Straight from Node.php… Empty functions!

   
   public function removeChild($childAssociation)
   {
      
   }
   public function addAssociation($to, $associationType)
   {
      list($associationType) = $this->_session->namespaceMap->getFullNames(array($associationType));
      
      $association = new Association($this, $to, $associationType);
      $this->addedAssociations[$to->__toString()] = $association;      
   }   
   public function removeAssociation($association)
   {
      
   }
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Combine this with cryptic SOAP error messages all over the place and that I can't get the simple method "addChild" to work at all for an important script I'm writing…  = frustration.   I've already put a lot of effort into using the PHP API successfully for several other projects, should I be considering re-coding them with perhaps the Java SDK which would hopefully be more robust?

Thanks for reading this far… I hope this post doesn't just sound like a negative rant. 
Any direction or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
Dave

[mrogers]

The PHP API is certainly not dead and the new mediaWiki integration of Labs 3C depends upon it.

In Alfresco 3 there has been an overhaul of the scripting environment mainly to get the Java Script api together to support web scripts and there's clearly scope to improve the php scripting environment as well.  However it simply comes down to time and priorities, we have lots of ideas and simply don't have time to implement them all.  

A final note about the wiki, may I perhaps cheekily point out that this is a community resource so if people do have good samples or find the structure unhelpful then they can go ahead and make things better.    I see that in another thread fellow community members did provide an upload php script, so the skills and an willingness to help exist in the community.    If everyone sits back and waits for Roy to do all the work then you may be in for a long wait.

[ddanninger]

Hi is a posted already in the other topic i can just recommend you to use my library till there will be an official update. (even it is outdated)

http://code.google.com/p/ifresco-php-library/

I fixed many todos in the PHP API and implemented a lot of the standard REST Services.

Some parts of the development:

copy & move
dictionary implementation as soap & rest
forms definition which is used by share
category management
parts of the administration service
zoho integration

and many many more.