Padraic Brady's Blog: Namespaces
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Adding even more to the huge namespaces debates going on, Padraic Brady has some of his opinions posted to his blog on the subject.   The problem isn't that namespaces are bad, it's that these arcane structures seem to have so little impact on development in PHP today for many many people. Does that mean it's unimportant?   He talks about the real value of namespaces, a comparison to type hinting's inclusion, the current amount of (needless?) traffic on the php.internals list and his opinions on why namespaces are valid.
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What's the difference between "Leap.A" and "Leap.B"? A look at naming of variants. Part of a series on hot security topics.
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For your consideration today, Philip Olson has worked up a listing of twenty (humorous) possible reasons that the names of the PHP functions are weird.   Here are 20 possible reasons why PHP functions lack consistent names and parameters. Learning the definition for every PHP function is truly an amazing feat and I doubt this has been attempted or accomplished by anyone. At least, by any sane human. And references are named references because they are designed to be referenced, right?   Items on the list include:  PHP likes BC PHP says all your namespace are belong to us PHP function naming algorithm still remains a secret and cannot be cracked PHP isn't designed to win a beauty contest
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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If you hang around on web-related mailing lists long enough, you start getting the idea that the future is full of metadata. Now, this metadata may or may not be XML, or it may or may not be RDF or OWL or a dozen other technologies with impressive-sounding words like &ldquo;ontology&rdquo; in their names. It may or may not be the long-dreamt-of (and often derided) &ldquo;Semantic Web.&rdquo; In fact, it may or may not be a dozen different buzzwords, and it may or may not be a good thing. But whatever the future is, it will definitely be full of metadata; on this the experts agree.    To my mind there&rsquo;s a problem with this: the argument always seems to depend on technologies which don&rsquo;t exist or aren&rsquo;t quite ready yet, so it always falls back to talking about how things will be &ldquo;in the future,&rdquo; which may never get here. Luckily, there's an easy way to add oodles of metadata to your documents right this minute, without having to learn anything more complicated than trusty old HTML 4.01. If it catches on, &ldquo;the future&rdquo; might get here a lot sooner than expected.
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One thing Tantek  is good at pointing out is that for the most part RDF is a failure in the wild.  I don't think the problem is RDF itself or even that the RDF/XML serialization format is so difficult.  The major problem is that developers are lazy and most of them aren't as smart as RDF format creators and specification authors.  In a former life I was a member of the RSS 1.0 Working Group and once argued that RDF was inevitable .  The theory being that people are going to want to extend RSS and stretch it into new and complicated areas and that only RDF could accomplish this.  The problem is that the RDF/XML serialization format is beyond horrible.  As an olive branch I presented my though ...
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Christian Wenz has pointed out an older post from Larry Wall talking about the line between scripting and programming languages (mentioning specifically PHP).  From the article "":  I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. [...] If I had to pick one metaphor, it'd be easy onramps. And a slow lane. Maybe even with some optional fast lanes.   Larry goes through tons of different older languages commenting on their viability in the online community including: Javascript, LISP, Pascal, Python, Ruby and PHP. He then looks at the present and what sorts of things are happening in languages these days. This list includes things like early binding/late binding, eager typology/lazy typology, limited structures/rich structures, class-based/prototype-based and transaction/reaction/dynamic scope.
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OK - I actually like and enjoy LDAP, but do not allow that to cloud your judgment. LDAP took much more of my time and effort to learn than Bind and/or DNS. And I recall sitting in front of DNS chapters wondering why we needed another language to do something as easy as mapping a friendly name to an IP address. This jargon stuff has value though such as constraing insomnia.
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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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Gerd Schauffelberger introduces a new package today as a part of his work with the pat-tools group - the patI18n package for internationalization.   In lack of a better idea, I founded a new PAT Package: patI18n. So far this package is just a draft and only exists in the SVN repository. As you might guess, patI18n is an abstraction layer for translating issues. Therefore it provides nearly the same interface as the famous GNU Gettext. Still, the actual translation is done by a chain of modules - this way everything is possible and the design stays open to new ideas.   He talks briefly about how it came to be and how it varies from some of the more traditional language translation tools. You can check out the example on his development environment or just use the snv details provided to grab the latest copy.
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Guilherme Blanco is proposing an interesting idea in his new blog entry - adding built in functionality to the PHP core that would allow a developer to register their own custom suprtglobals.   Currently, we deal with a lot of interesting situations of web applications, and some really interesting are the superglobals variables. Seems there will be a change in superglobals soon and that's why I decided to post about it here.   His example of the need for something like this is as an alternative to using the Singleton pattern to work with multiple database connections in an application. His proposal is that, by including this register_superglobal functionality, it would make it easier to share these kinds of connections. He even includes a simple code example of how it might look.
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Nice blog post via Slava  criticizing the quality of the Java runtime and hotspot compiler:  "The HotSpot source code is a bad joke We wasted an afternoon and had a good laugh on IRC today, looking over parts of the SCSL sources to HotSpot and the sun.* classes. I can't give too much detail or paste code samples because that would violate Sun's ... license, but here are some highlights:"  This is my favorite one:  "A lot of preprocessors are used. This includes a mix of awk, sed, shell scripts, and indeed, Scheme! Yes, the JVM source includes jscheme.jar, used to generate some CORBA classes. Considering that Sun talks about how bad preprocessors are, its hypocritical of them to use preproces ...
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Padraic Brady has posted a manifesto of sorts about the work that he's been doing on his PHPSpec library and trying to work it into the approval process for the Zend Framework.   I'll be attempting to pound the Zend Framework into submission so I can apply Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) using PHPSpec when I write a Controller. Why? Because I feel like it, and it gives me an excuse to promote one possible incarnation of PHPMock and the PHPSpec Zend Framework extension. See? Perfectly reasonable selfishness!   He hopes to move it past the typical test-driven development process that PHPUnit offers and "kick your ass into high-TDD gear" without having to have worked much with it before then (the key is simplicity).   He includes some code examples (how it should flow) and describes some of the challenges that he's coming across so far, specifically with the way that the Zend Framework works with the Controllers and what he wants to accomplish.
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This is interesting .  43Things has tags as well!  A lot of people are using the Flickr dynamic and bold font treemap view which I'm not sure is good or bad. I've never been fully happy with this view but a lot of people seem to like it (so what do I know!)
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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In another quick note from Chris Shiflett, there's a summary of php|works and some of the comments made about it:
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In his latest post, Jacob Santos talks about global functions and some of the dangers behind using them in your code (as per his own experience debugging with them in place).   When I develop in PHP and code functions, I always either place them in a file or place them at the top of the script. Well, this is more about C++ and how I totally freaked out my teacher, by breaking his paradigm of thought. You see, you can have a definition of a function at the top of the page and then code the body of the function later.   He soon discovered his problem in debugging the script - he was too used to having the global functions at the top (as in C++) and not mixed in with the code - or at the bottom of the script.    If there is something at least somewhat common about popular scripts that people use and extend, is that the functions are placed in organized manner. Reforming otherwise is a bitch and I remember rewriting the entire script anyway. You can't reform when you can't reuse anything.