Yawp is "yet another web programming" foundation for PHP4 (it works in PHP5, too, but is not E_STRICT compliant). It composes a number of PEAR classes into a single encapsulating class so that you can concentrate on writing business logic, not instantiating your support objects. Yawp is a single PHP file, and uses a single .ini file for its configuration.

Among other things, Yawp lets you define "hook" scripts to execute at certain times. For example, a "start" hook runs every time you call Yawp::start(), a "stop" hook executes every time you call Yawp::stop(), and so on.

One of the issues with a "start" hook is that it runs only after the internal Yawp objects have been instantiated (DB, Auth, Log, etc). Sometimes, however, a developer will want to run scripts **before** the objects are created, perhaps in order to replace the standard Yawp objects with objects of his own. That kind of functionality was not available in Yawp 1.x and earlier without a lot of extra work.

The guys at Babel.com.au got tired of this, and one of their developers (Justin Randell) sent me a major patch to add a new kind of hook, the "prep" hook, which is now available in the new Yawp 1.2.0 release.

"Prep" hooks run almost immediately in the Yawp::start() process: right after the configuration file text is loaded, and before the first internal Yawp object is created. Thereafter, each internal Yawp object creation routine checks to see if it has already been created by a prep hook, and skips creation if so. This allows a great deal of control over the Yawp internal objects. (One note of caution: if you override a default object like Auth, make sure your overriding API matches the API expected by the Yawp static convenience methods, otherwise those convenience methods will break.)

In other news, the Yawp::getObject() method had a bug in it where, if a requested object did not exist, there was no return statement. This bug was not an issue in PHP 4.3.x and earlier, but in PHP 4.4.x (when the internals of the engine were changed somewhat) that behavior causes an error stating "only variables may be returned by reference." The fix was simple: if the object doesn't exist, return null (instead of having no return statement at all).

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