Brandon Savage has his own response to the "comments are harmful" post over on the PHP in Action blog:
There's a lot of good advice, especially about writing clean code. But the article fails to address a good number of really critical details and to some degree misses the point of Eli's article.
He mentions these points - the value of writing comments before hand, the usefulness of descriptive comments, how they can be used as a todo pointing to future development and using them to share the knowledge and let other people in on what you're thinking.
In this post to his PHPJack blog Richard Heyes comments on the trending he's seeing in the Zend Framework and where its future might lie.
I have been critical of ZF in the past because the performance has pretty much been going down every release and I am not the only one seeing this, there have been a number of benchmarks that show this trend. Having contributed to ZF in the past I brought this issue up multiple times both on the mailing list and even during the meetings the past zendcons and it the general response was they where focusing on features not performance.
He points out a few things that were brought up at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo including the performance focus of future releases, a push to 2.0 after PHP 5.3's release and some of the changes that can cause breaks in backwards compatibility.
Be sure to also check out Matthew Weier O'Phinney's response to the post and some of the comments Richard made.
After hearing Stefan Priebsch's talk at this year's Dutch PHP Conference, something occurred to Derick Rethans - there was a small sort of issue with using namespaces and possible future PHP's own namespace.
One of the things that came up is the conflicts that can arise with internal classes. In PHP 5.3 this would alias the class Interval in the namespace PEAR::Date to the class Interval. For now, this code would work just fine. However, if PHP would introduce a class "Interval" at some point in the future (and PHP can do this as it owns the global namespace) then the above code would suddenly stop working
He offers a simple solution that can prevent this sort of conflict for the future - defining your "use" and then creating a new instance of the namespace into a variable instead of just an "as".
In a new post on the IBM developerWorks page, Nathan Good takes a look at some of the features of the up and coming versions of the PHP language including things like namespaces, changes in the XML handling and a few things taken out.
PHP's next edition, V6, includes new features and syntax improvements that will make it easier to use from an object-oriented standpoint. Other important features, such as Unicode support in many of the core functions, mean that PHP V6 is positioned for better international support and robustness.
New features he mentions include namespace support, improvements to the native Unicode support as well as a few of the things that will be permanently retired like the php.ini settings for magic_quotes and register_globals.
On his blog, Padraic Brady has posted his thoughts on the Zend Framework and what the latest release of it, ZF v1.5, means for its future in the web development world.
With 1.5, everything that makes the framework attractive has quite simply been boosted. We now have a fully comprehensive complex view aggregation/templating system to play with, we have a forms component, translations are integrated as view helpers. Just rattling off several new features is enough to pull together just how comprehensive and cohesive the framework has become over it's 1.0 predecessor. It's that significant.
He talks about things like Zend_Layout and additions to Zend_Form as well as the community around the framework and some of the places that the framework and its process are still lacking a bit.
Elizabeth Naramorepoints out the recent publication of the latest International PHP Magazine issue for July of 2007:
I was happy to contribute to their recently released June edition. I did an interview with the new PEAR Group on the future of PEAR. I'm glad to see such enthusiasm and collaboration among the newly elected group.
Ed Finkler has an interesting new post on his blog today that looks at what kind of influence the Zend Framework has had on the PHP community's outlook on secure web development.
I posted this rather lengthy argument in the Zend fw-core mailing list after I learned that the Zend_Filter_Input component had been dropped from the Zend Framework. I have used this component extensively in various projects, and had written up a contribution to the Zend DevZone that described using a bootstrap script to block direct access by your developers to the superglobal user input arrays ($_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE, etc).
He includes the post and talks about things like the good side of PHP's popularity and the bad side (like developers that cannot write secure applications). He targets the Zend Framework as one tool that has made it slightly harder to write secure applications (as of the move from 0.7 to 0.8 because of small things like having to create a filter object to do any filtering).
The key to his complaint is the removal of the Zend_Filter_Input component which, from his perspective, made things easier to secure and made for simpler and cleaner code.
Mutation testing - an approach where the testing tool makes some change to the tested code, runs the tests, and if the tests pass displays a message saying what it changed
Web Interface for Test Result Database - output viewer for the database logging PHPUnit is now capable of.
Greg Beaverhas announced an "official referendum on the future of PEAR" that he has set in motion to get PEAR developers voting on proposals for where PEAR should be going.
As of February 22, 2007, I have called an official referendum on the future of PEAR. There is a news item on the front page of pear.php.net with the same instructions in this message. This election is only open to PEAR developers who have contributed to the development of a PEAR package at any time in history, but you must have the ability to log in at pear.php.net, and must have "pear.dev" karma.
There's three options - "don't change anything", Greg's constitution, or Anant Narayanan's constitution. The results will pick the path that PEAR will follow and the future of the project. If you have access and the pear.dev karma, head over here and cast your vote today.
In a new article on the Zend Developer Zone, Ed Finkler talks a bit about the newly released version of the PHPSecInfo package (version 0.1.2) and what some of the future plans for it are.
New release, new plans! First off, a new build of PHPSecInfo is out. Version 0.1.2, build 20061218. Per usual, get your new version from http://phpsec.org/projects/phpsecinfo/.
New features include:
Code is now licensed under 'New BSD' license. See LICENSE
fix bug in post_max_size check where upload_max_size value was being checked
Now providing an md5 hash for releases
And some of the plans for the future include more detailed test results, a web-based "glossary" of howtos on fixing problems, and more tests for more cases.
If you'd like to contribute tests or other resources to the project, head over to its homepage and let them know.
