autoloader

Some watchful readers pointed out some subtle but nonetheless important bugs in the framework we have built yesterday.

When creating a framework, you must be sure that it behaves as advertised. If not, all the applications based on it will exhibit the same bugs.

The good news is that whenever you fix a bug, you are fixing a bunch of applications too.

You may have heard about Composer and Packagist lately.

In short, Composer is a new package manager for PHP libraries. Quite a few people have been complaining about the lack of information, or just seemed confused as to what it was, or why the hell we would do such a thing.

This is my attempt at clarifying things.

This second part of this post, tentatively titled Use Cases, will be out next week if time allows.

Part 2 of my personal programming projects during the Horde Hackathon 2011 in Boston, featuring an autoloader cache which boosts performance a bunch.

On the ZendCasts.com site there's a new screencast posted looking at autoloading in phar, the packaging tool built into PHP.

This is a continuation of the series started here.

Building on the foundation from the previous screencast, he shows how to enhance it and allow it to autoload based on an autoloader defined in a "stub.php" file.

In his latest post Volker looks at something he sees more and more projected implementing as a simple way to not have to manually define paths all over their applications - creating autoloaders.

His post shows how to create one such autoloader for a legacy, non-framework type of project.

Note: I have tested this in PHPUnit 3.4.1 and haven't tried it out in 3.5.
Anyone who has worked with PHPUnit has most likely worked with expected

A big topic in the world of PHP recently has been interoperability between libraries. With the release of PHP 5.3 and the introduction of namespaces some discussion of new standards around the use of namespaces to promote the interoperability of autoloader implementations has started.

Brandon Savage has a new post to his blog today with a few tips on some "micro" optimizations you can make to your PHP applications to improve performance and make for better maintainability.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post on something he's been asked about a lot - autoloading Doctrine into a Zend Framework application.

Rob Allen has posted a look at working with modules in the Zend Framework.

His specific goal is to create a model that's inside a module from inside another module (clear as mud? keep going!)