[jira] Commented: (THRIFT-717) Global variables should not be used for configuration of PHP library

["Nicholas Telford (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-717?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12839664#action_12839664 ] 

Nicholas Telford commented on THRIFT-717:
-----------------------------------------

Ok, sure, the performance and security issues are fairly pointless. The biggest problem here is pollution of the global namespace, which is a bit of a show-stopper when integrating in to larger frameworks or libraries.

Constants work because they don't pollute the $GLOBALS super-global and are immutable, so other system components can't accidentally modify them (i.e. through naming clashes) without the developer being alerted to it.

I thought I'd got all references to $GLOBALS['THRIFT_ROOT'], I take it some reside outside of lib/php/src/ ?

> Global variables should not be used for configuration of PHP library
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: THRIFT-717
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-717
>             Project: Thrift
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: Library (PHP)
>            Reporter: Nicholas Telford
>            Priority: Minor
>         Attachments: thrift_php_globalsToConstants.diff
>
>   Original Estimate: 2h
>  Remaining Estimate: 2h
>
> The Thrift PHP library makes gratuitous use of the $GLOBALS array to store basic configuration.
> Globals in PHP are generally bad practice, so I suggest something else: Use constants.
> Being immutable, constants are more secure than globals (that could be overwritten in scripts susceptible to injection attacks); they also perform much better, since the $GLOBALS variable is a hash-table, lookups are comparatively expensive.
> I will attach a patch soon unless anyone has any better ideas.

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