Pimple-interop

This package contains an extension to the Pimple DI container that makes Pimple compatible with the container-interop API.

How to use it?

Instead of using the Pimple class, you can use the PimpleInterop class. This class extends Pimple. PimpleInterop implements ContainerInterface and ParentAwareContainerInterface. This means you can access your Pimple entries by using the get and has methods, and that you can chain containers using the setParentContainer method.

Here is a sample chaining 2 Pimple instances (in the real world, you would rather chain Pimple with another DI container, of course:

// Let's declare a first container
$pimpleParent = new PimpleInterop();
$pimpleParent['hello'] = 'world';

// Let's declare another container
$pimple = new PimpleInterop();
$pimple->setParentContainer($pimpleParent);

// Prints "world".
echo $pimple->get('hello');

Why the need for this package?

This package is part of a long-term effort to bring interoperability between DI containers. The ultimate goal is to make sure that multiple containers can communicate together by sharing entries (one container might use an entry from another container, etc...)

But can't we already do this?

The excellent Acclimate can already provide an adapter around Pimple. The adapter implements the ContainerInterface (or a similar interface).

However, the adapter design pattern cannot be used to implement efficiently the ParentAwareContainerInterface. Indeed, to implement this interface, you need to modify the very behaviour of the object, and the adapter design pattern is not always well suited for this.

Also, there are other cases where the adapter design pattern is not enough. For instance, the Silex MVC microframework is directly extending the Pimple class. We could fork the Silex MVC microframework to make it use PimpleInterop instead of Pimple easily. However, it would be almost impossible for Silex to use the adapted Pimple instance from Acclimate (because Silex relies on all the methods of Pimple that are not implemented by the adapter).

More about the ParentAwareContainerInterface implementation

The ParentAwareContainerInterface states that:

• When an instance is TODO: finish this: speak about the 2 modes

Found a typo? Something is wrong in this documentation? Just fork and edit it!