Nick Halstead's Blog: Uses of Pseudo Code in Development
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In a post from Nick Halstead on the Programming and Management Blog, he discusses something just about every developer is familiar with - pseudo code.   Writing pseudo code and program code separately simplifies the overall task by splitting it into two simpler tasks. While writing the algorithm the developer can focus on solving the problem, not how it is written in a a particular language. Once the pseudo code is written and has been checked; writing the real code becomes much simpler, the programmer is only concerned with converting the pseudo code into the appropriate program code.   Nick looks at both sides of its use and includes the good (doesn't take language-specific understanding) and the bad (could hide logic flaws that could be tragic later). He also includes a quick overview of how to write it, making sure to keep things high level and all about the structure.
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Matthew Turland, like many in the PHP community these days, has been pondering PHP6 and what it might mean to both the developers and to the language itself:   Be that as it may, as a user with about five years under his belt as of now who has seen all qualities of PHP code ranging from pristine to pedantic, a thought or two has crossed my mind on the subject of the latest upcoming incarnation of the language.   Specifically, he talks about some of the hot topics like namespaces, the mysqlnd driver, Unicode support, and named parameters. Overall, though, his comments are positive, looking toward a brighter future for PHP with this upcoming edition.
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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Elizabeth Smith has posted a new item to her blog today with information about a PHP-GTK2 framework that she's been working on (and with) called the Callicore Desktop.   Donât look at me like that, I havenât lost my mind. Itâs not really a framework in the traditional MVC web application sense. Instead itâs a group of fairly loosely coupled widgets and classes with an emphasis on clean code.   With the help of several singletons, multiple widgets and a modular structure, the Callicore Desktop makes working with this parts as simple as calling it on the command line (with limited setup). If you'd like to get a look at the current version of the framework, check out the Callicore site or just head straight to the code.
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An introduction to using refactoring, unit testing and ZenTest on existing code.
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In response to this recent article from the Hiveminds website, Marco Tabini has a few choice words about some of the topics they cover in the article, and cover incorrectly.   Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.   He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.
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Matthew O'Phinney has two new posts that talk about something object-oriented developers seem to shy away from - globals in their classes and how they can make things more difficult to make "embeddable applications" a reality.   In my previous entry, I ranted about the use of globals in popular PHP applications, and how they make embedding said applications difficult. I develop using object-oriented practices, and can honestly say I can't recall ever having slung a global variable around in my own code. Globals seem hackish to me, and as a result, trying to get applications that use them to behave correctly has been a challenge.   In the first part, he notes an interesting find about the $GLOBALS value and illustrates with a code example how he was able to get around it in his instance (wrapping a Serendipity instance in a Zend Framework app).   In part two, though, and uses another code example to show what kind of issues he was seeing with the $GLOBALS - a script that sets some globals in different instances and echoes the results back out.
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On Dynamically Typed today, Harry discusses a possible trend seen in some of the PHP jobs out there:
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Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.   Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.   He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.    In his opinion:   No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.   Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.
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Open Source methodology has gained some ground in one of the last places you and I might expect: In the development area of corporations. Consultants are calling environments like Sourceforge Enterprise Edition a Digital Development Environment.
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This is a followup on Marco Tablini's discussion of the PHP programmer availablity and my earlier attempt at defining enterprise PHP.
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Back in the days of stone knives and bearskins applications were  things that were written in cretinous languages like COBOL that  ran on wierd 71 bit architectures and used messed up file formats like  JCL and VSAM files or whatever.  What's a 'Data Division'?  Some whiny  80s band from Manchester?      Of course today we are so much  smarter.  If you look at the evolution, from ML, to branched languages  to structured programming to OOP, and from 3270 applications, to PC  apps to client server to web apps, you can clearly see how the  applications programmer transformed himself from knuckle dragging  simian to homo sapiens. That's the stereotype, right?    We have a name for all that old stuff, a pejorative name:  'legacy'.[1]   I'm here to tell you that the web application is the new  legacy.
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Picking back up on his blog, Sean Coates shares a Dashboard widget he's created to do quick and dirty PHP interpreting on the fly:   I found myself using php -r on the command line to test some simple code snippets, and it occurred to me that this isn't "The Mac Way." So, following the excellent documentation at Apple, I managed to come up with something pretty useful in an afternoon.   His widget sits happily, ready to take in PHP code and output the result at the click of a button.
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On Codewalkers.com today, there's a new tutorial posted concerning some of the looping features PHP has to offer.
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Blog: Some developers must have too much time on their hands
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Stijn Leenknegt's Blog: [PHP6] function-return-array idea!GeesNotNerds Blog: Free PHP + Ajax chat appStefan Mischook's Blog: Object Oriented PHP Tutorial Updated - Steps 18 - 22Dave Dash's Blog: SymfonyCampWebDigity.com: PHP geotargeting techniquesEtienne Kneuss' Blog: Late Static Bindings ExplainedDevShed: Handling Static Data with PHP 5PHP-Learn-It.com: Cooking Cookies with PHPMichael Kimsal's Blog: PHP PredictionJob Posting: Steinman Recruiting Seeks Senior Developer (Littleton, CO)
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On LinuxJournal today, there's a new article from Marco Tabini about the power of PHP as a multi-purpose language (and not just for web pages anymore).