I just started up a podcast called Developer Hell with my fellow piss-and-moan-driven-development practitioner Ed Finkler . It basically consists of Ed and I sitting down and just having an open and unedited discussion about whatever programming-related topic we feel like rambling on and on about. Our first episode covered the always-riveting topic of "What We Hate About PHP".

Now even though it is just us complaining about stuff in PHP that we don't like, regardless of the true merits of our complaints, it sparked a discussion on Twitter about just what should be done to make handling PUT and DELETE requests better in PHP.

$_POST and $_GET are workhorses of the PHP world, used in any application that accepts web requests from somewhere. Sometimes accessing them is wrapped inside objects or filtered out using the filter() extension of even Inspekt but I think this illustrates the problem.

Laura Thompson made the suggestion that PHP should look to port the concept of the Request object that Python uses over to PHP. As a cryptopythonista I think that is an excellent idea. Elizabeth Smith did ask for some constructive ideas on solving this problem. While my C skills are non-existent, I thought I'd delve a bit into more higher-level thoughts about this.

I think the fact that we have $_POST and $_GET lulls some of us into the false sense that we should have $_PUT and $_DELETE objects, since that would map to the commonly-desired set of HTTP verbs that REST likes to use. But what should be inside those things, or should we be moving towards a more Pythonesque solution where a Request object, as part of core or via a only-really-for-the-brave- PECL extension?

What I'm really after is for an easy way to detect that a PUT or DELETE request has been made. Existing solutions for these are not pretty and ( in my opinion) non-intuitive. With my thoughts that PHP is quickly turning into a tool used for web service API end points that don't require insane levels of concurrency, the idea that there is no native support for figuring out if you're been given a PUT or DELETE request is disheartening.

The PECL HTTP extension is a step in the correct direction, but it too has some rough edges and would require a lot of polishing before it could be moved into the core where it really belongs.

Again, what I'm looking for is an easy way for PHP to be able to know what type of request it is dealing with so I can make my PHP applications more aware of what it being asked of them. It seems that pretty much every framework implements their own Request/Response objects, so that should be an indication that this kind of code abstraction is a desired core PHP feature.

Share your thoughts with me in the comments.