Image manipulation library for PHP 5.3 | Hacker News Reader

Image manipulation library for PHP 5.3

imagine.readthedocs.org

83 pointsavalanche12328 comments

This has appeared at just the right time, now I'm re-working my project's image manipulation classes. The PHP GD library functions are a nightmare for readability.

I'll be having a little play about with what I intend to implement and if it works out well I'll likely implement it in my project proper!

> “Why didn’t he keep width and height as simple integer parameters in every method that needed those?” or “Why is x and y coordinates are an object called Point?”

Seems to me that PHP needs to turn its own primitives into objects so they can be type hinted. Trying to figure out which of a dozen number validation functions to use is an utter clusterfuck at the best of times.

It's really good to see some well engineered PHP software coming out.

For my projects I've moved out to Python after having dealt with legacy trash like Wordpress, Google's api libraries, over-engineered frameworks like ZF and lets just say the less said about Propel the better.

Code like this, Symfony 2, Doctrine 2, Lithium etc... are a breath of fresh air. Their obviously written by a group of talented devs and after cutting ties with legacy PHP versions < 5.3 the future of "modern" PHP is looking bright!

Looks great, but...I clicked on "examples" and expected examples of output in addition to code examples...Please add these if you have time.

thanks, will do!

Whats\With\All\The\Backslashes? Am I only one seeing that in the examples?

It's PHP 5.3's namespacing functionality, in a nutshell.

Symfony2 and Lithium are two frameworks I can currently think of that use them extensively. On the one hand, Symfony2 has a quite extreme implementation, and on the other, Lithium's is much more concise. The backslashes can be used to represent a hierarchy.

Oh for the love of science, please let this be a bad dream ... is the parent object referred to as C:\ by any chance?

Zend Framework 2.0 is also a big user of PHP namespaces. It's in beta the moment.

Namespaces, as others have mentioned. The first question I had when I first encountered that as the Namespace operator was: "Why not the double colon operator?"

Double colon is already being used for static member referencing, and in a few talks I've heard from Rasmus, they weren't able to find a way to overload it for Namespaces.

Another option that was discussed was a triple colon operator, which most were opposed to b/c of it's length. I personally think the backslash is ugly, and I kind of like the triple colon operator better b/c of it's similarity to the double colon operator. Regardless of which one is prettier, I wish the double colon operator could have been overloaded.

IIRC, the reasoning against double colons was that if you had a class and a namespace with the same name, it's impossible to tell whether SomeThing::Do() is calling a function in the SomeThing namespace, or the static Do function on the SomeThing class. One could argue that they could simple not allow namespaces and classes to share names, but I guess they didn't like that idea, either.

I hope I'm stating this right, I must admit it's from a fuzzy recollection.

> the backslash is ugly

Not only that, it's very unconfortable to type in some international keyboard layouts.

If you're talking about the German layout and AltGr, then so are the []{} keys, which are already used quite a lot in PHP programming.

It's the main reason why, even though my phyiscal keys are in German layout, I still have the USA layout in software. It's just nice to be able to make [] with a single key press :)

Agreed. Although function-¥ does give my hands a stretch now and then, I don't want to be typing it constantly..

They are harder (than many other commonly used characters) to distinguish from regular text as well.

PHP's method for using Namespaces: http://php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.php

Since this is a PHP 5.3 library it's using PHP namespaces.

Welcome to PHP 5.3 :)

I wonder how many times I will need to see PHP 5.3's backslashes before they look 'correct' :)

There goes my unique flask-extension documentation style. :(

sorry, it looked so awesome and I noticed the kind requirement to use it for flask-only projects after rolled the new sphinx design out. I promise to use a different theme and is something I'm working on now.

Just curious, is there a reason you chose GD over imlib2?

I've used both and I think I prefer imlib2 for flexibility and breadth, and there's already at least one imlib2 binding for PHP: http://pp.siedziba.pl/

Hasn't been updated in a while? Is it even still supported?

Thanks, I'd seen so many language bindings for imlib2 (and, yes, gd) that I'd assumed it was an active project, but you're right that it's not. Also gd does a lot more than it used to.

Thanks for the correction!

very cool, I'll see about adding support for it too

Probably not worth the trouble, since as mp3geek points out, it's stale (according to wikipedia, a deprecated/defunct part of Enlightenment)

Besides being a great library, its an excellent example of well written PHP code.

Looks very nice, a worthy successor to http://wideimage.sourceforge.net/

I look forward to using it.

i am so glad to be reminded of this. Now i just need to implement a filter for assetic at some point.

Assetic still relies on opti{png,jpeg} which i'm sure works pretty well, but also requires one to call out to an external program.

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