ProDevTips.com: Why PHP as a templating language sucks
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The ProDevTips.com site has a little something to say about PHP as a templating language - "it sucks":   I frequently read articles about why any template system made with PHP is per definition redundant because PHP is itself such a good templating engine. This is my take on this whole rant-genre.   He points out an article from the "why it doesn't suck" sort of from Brian Lozier that he thinks "misses the heart of the issue". He suggests the opposite, however - that PHP as a templating language (templating software written in PHP sitting on top of a PHP application) is a really bad idea. It only adds overhead that most developers, unless they're experienced with the technology enough to know how to use it, will only work around (like the {php}{/php} tags in Smarty).
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest poll conducted over this past week asking which, of their given options, is the best helpful hint for creating a web application in PHP.   Two of the options ranked higher than the rest with one (Page/object caching) coming out on top of the other (Don't save performance testing for the end of the project). The remainder of the votes were divided pretty evenly between the last three options: "Use multi result set queries to your database", "gzip compression", and "Tune your web server".   While you're in the polling mood, you should check out this week's new poll that wonders which of their options might be the biggest hindrance to PHP5's adoption in the community.
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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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php|architect has a new note about a few PHP vulnerabilities:
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Josh Sharp has posted a new article to his blog advocating something that there's still a lot of controversy around in the PHP community - frameworks (when to use them and when to not).   PHP's ease of use is also its downfall. Because there are less restrictions on the structure of the code you write, it's much easier to write bad code. But there is a solution: use a framework. [...] Of course, if you're not taken with any of the packages above you can also write your own framework, which I've done and will talk about in the next few posts. But for now, let's have a look at the common benefits of a framework.   He's broken it out to talk about the usual framework structure, MVC and how a framework can enforce good code standards. He also mentions some happy side benefits of their use including making for "pretty URLs" and the helpers that most of the frameworks come with.
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The International PHP Magazine is back this week with the results from their latest user poll that asked the question "Which Stage Comes First in the Development of the Basic CMS?"   Of course, of the options they gave, "Planning your CMS" came in with an overwhelming lead of 60.5 percent of the votes. Lagging far behind that was "Further Development" and "Database creation". It is good to see that a large majority of the people out there think that taking the time out to plan out the application first is the best way to go. Throwing something together, especially something that can get as complex as a CMS, is a very bad idea.   Be sure and get your votes in on this week's poll that asks which of the given options including "Web and command-line interface" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source") wouldn't be a good option to be added to the phpDocumentor functionality.
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On his blog, Stuart Herbert has a quick tip showing how to mimic a feature of Ruby on Rails:   I'm still working on the next article in my series looking at PHP on servers, so in the mean time, check out this simple way to emulate Ruby's nice way of handling separate getter, setter and state query methods in PHP.   He admits his example isn't as elegant as the Ruby method, but it does get the job done. Code for the method is included in his post ready for cut and pasting.
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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On the Metapundit.net site, there's a new (long) entry that takes a look at one of the programming styles, functional programming, and checks into its support in PHP. Unfortunately, it's mostly a swing and a miss.   I should just get this straight right off the bat: you can't really do much functional programing in PHP. Functions are not first class citizens and the equivalent of passing functions around is passing around strings or arrays and relying on convention. No really.   He goes on by illustrating the point that PHP can do this sort of thing but only up to a point. Once you start to get into anonymous functions and moving past things like the array_map function, you start to loose a foothold. The create_function function allows for a bit more flexibility, but still doesn't fulfill the requirements needed for full support.
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Although frankly I really didn't feel the need to read the entire thread, I can tell you that the posting to the PHP 3 mailing list is related to the Smarty Templating Engine back in the day. In fact, I believe this was the original spec Andrei proposed before Smarty even existed. Although I don't remember the exact e-mail, this posting reminded me that there was a point in time I thought exactly this way... quoting myself: