PHP Utility Classes for the Composer Class Manager

This package contains utility classes that are needed by the php-ccm project.

In many if not all cases, the utility will actually be an abstract class and the class name will end with the word Promise as it promises the actual utilities that extend the abstract class will have certain properties and methods defined in the abstract class.

The purpose of doing it this way, for the actual utilities themselves, it allows alternative implementations to be written and used.

The class files that extend the *Promise abstract classes should use the \CCM namespace within the root namespace, e.g.

<?php
namespace CCM;
class FooBar extends \CCM\Promises\WhateverPromise
{
  code here
}

That way utilities and applications can simply call

$obj = new \CCM\FooBar;

And they will get an object that has the properties and methods defined in the abstract class, so those properties and methods are safe to use regardless of who's implementation of the Promise they are using.

AutoloadPromise

This is the Promise that needs to be extended for the CCM class autoloading. When extending the class for a custom autoloader, the custome autoloader should use the class name \CCM\ClassLoader and should explicitly load the promise abstract class:

require_once(__DIR__ . '/stable/libraries/ccm/promises/AutoloadPromise.php');

This is because autoloading does not exist until after an object of the class has been created.

The autoloader should be in a file named ClassLoader.php and installed in the root php-ccm directory as /usr/share/ccm/ClassLoader.php because that is web applications will expect it to be.

The example autoloader (in the example/ directory of the git repository) is probably good enough for most use cases, but someone who prefers a different caching engine may wish to create an alternative implementation of the abstract AutoloadPromise class.