Advanced PHP Type Hinting

PHP supports type hinting for defined classes but not for primitive types. This project demonstrates how PHP doc comments can be used to ensure strongly-typed method signatures. I do not recommend to use this approach in production systems due to its negative performance implications. You might want to take a look at Facebook's new programming language Hack if you intend to implement strongly-typed methods.

Example Usage

Define a class whose method calls should be checked for correct parameter types. Note the type definition in the doc comment.

namespace std\ocl;

class Example
{
    /**
     * @param int $arg
     */
    public function callMethodWithEnforcedParameter($arg) {
        // This method will only be called if $arg is of type int.
    }
}

You need to use the supplied factory to create an instance of this class:

$example = CoreFactory::get(
    'std\\ocl',
    'Example'
);

The following call will fail because 'foo' is a string:

$example->callMethodWithEnforcedParameter('foo');

However, this will work:

$example->callMethodWithEnforcedParameter(42);