Things I miss in PHP: Function decorators

The problem:

I want to build a set of classes accessible via REST interface. One example here with ZF. My idea is allow users to access via REST to my set of classes. It’s no so difficult. But the problem appears when I want to set an authorization engine to my REST web service. Public functions can be called but sometimes user must be authenticated (with a trusted cookie).

I have my class:

class Lib_Myclass
{
    public function publicFunction($var1)
    {
        return "Hello {$var1}";
    }
 
    public function privateFunction($var1)
    {
        return "private Hello {$var1}";
    }
}

publicFunction can be called without login but privateFunction only after login

I have done similar with python and Google App Engine. With python I use decorators and its very clean and easy

class Myclass:
    def publicFunction(self, var1):
        return "Hello %s" % var1
 
    @private
    def privateFunction(self, var1):
        return "private Hello %s" % var1

And I define my decorator ‘private’:

def private(funcion):
    def _private(*list_args):
        if isValidUser():
            valor = funcion(*list_args)
        else:
            value = ('You must be logged')
        return value
    return _private

Really simple and clean. But in PHP I don’t know how to do it in a simple way. I don’t want to do reflections in every call and check if the function is allowed or not.

My solution:

Instead of having one class with public and private functions I divide it in two classes: one for the public function and another one for the private (private here means logged sessions not private keyword in PHP). I also create two empty Interfaces PublicAccess and PrivateAccess and using PHP’s instanceof I can throw an exception if user without login tries to call any function in a class with the interface PrivateAccess

interface PublicAccess{}
interface PrivateAccess{}
 
class Lib_Myclass1 implements PublicAccess
{
    public function publicFunction($var1)
    {
        return "Hello {$var1}";
    }
}
 
class Lib_Myclass2 implements PrivateAccess
{
 
    public function privateFunction($var1)
    {
        return "private Hello {$var1}";
    }
}

I prefer the python’s solution

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