I started a wiki on this site (http://www.kchodorow.com/php) to write down all the stuff I learn about writiing PHP extensions. If anyone else has experience with them, feel free to add or edit articles.
Some basics: a PHP extension is written in C. In fact, PHP itself is written in C, so there’s a lot of good source code to look at out there. There’s an excellent introduction to writing PHP extensions at Zend DevZone. However, it doesn’t go into a lot of the specifics, which is why I started the wiki. I had to figure out how to do a ton of stuff on my own, mostly by digging through the PHP source code and other extensions’ source code. No one should have to look through 500 undocumented C files to figure out how to create a PHP class in C. (However, if you like digging through source code, it’s all available to view on the web. Extensions are under pecl and PHP source is available under php-src.)
I feel like I have a pretty good handle on how to do almost anything with PHP in C, so if anyone has any questions or suggestions for an article, feel free to ask and I’ll try to write a page on it.
Upcoming pages I’d planning on writing:
– Throwing exceptions
– How to extend/implement other classes
– Using HashTable
Kristina Chodorow's Blog 