CHAPTER 4 – REFLECTION

4.5.1 Introduction New to PHP 5 are its reflection capabilities (also referred to as introspec- tion). These features enable you to gather information about your script at runtime; specifically, you can examine your functions, classes, and more. It also enables you to access such language objects by using the available meta- data. In many cases, the fact that PHP enables you to call functions indirectly (using $func(...)) or instantiate classes directly (new $classname(...)) is suffi- cient. However, in this section, you see that the provided reflection API is more powerful and gives you a rich set of tools to work directly with your applica- tion.