ralph schindler

Ralph Schindler has a new post to his today looking back at a sort of history of autoloading and some of what we've learned even in just the journey from PHP 5.0 to 5.3 (and has become best practice in the community).

Upon the arrival of PHP 5.0, the ability to autoload classes was introduced. At the time, autoloading was such a new feature, it was hardly adopted.

As such, many applications being ported from PHP4 to PHP5 still had lots of procedural code in them (code incapable of being be autoloaded) and many class files which had long ‘require_once‘ lists.

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This new post on the Zend Developer Zone (from Ralph Schindler) is announcing this month's Zend Framework Bug Hunt Days starting today (the 26th) and running through Saturday (the 28th).

Over the past few years, there are a few concepts and programming patterns that have muscled their way into the hearts and minds of PHP developers from other languages and programming communities.

These concepts range from the MVC application architecture as well as various modeling techniques (think ActiveRecord and Data Mapper), to a pure shift in the way we think about application architectures, like aspect-oriented programming (AoP) and event-driven programming.

Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:

• OurBlogLog.com: Joomla vs Drupal , The Sad Truth
• IBM developerWorks: Python basics for PHP developers
• PHPBuilder.com: The Top Five PHP Content Management Systems
• Brian Swan's Blog: Getting Started with PHP and SQL Azure
• Ivo Jansch's Blog: PHP as a template language <

On the Zend Developer Zone today Ralph Schindler has officially announced the first bug hunt event of 2011 for the Zend Framework happening today through the 22nd.

Another unified constructor sighting in the wild: Ralph Schindler – PHP Component and Library API Design Overview.

There’s been lots of change in the PHP community over the past few years. PHP now has namespaces. More PHP developers are using an IDE.

More PHP developers are pulling inspiration from the Java, C#/.NET, and Ruby communities. And even more PHP developers are embracing the object-oriented and, ironically, the functional nature (closures) of PHP.

All these changes make for interesting code. What has also happened is that better and more readable code is being produced by this ever growing PHP community.

As I ws working on some new development in our codebase this morning, I started updating some
unit tests to match.

I was looking through the code for one of them and came across a test name that was easily 50 characters long and
it got me wondering – what was the popular opinion on naming conventions and commenting in unit tests.

Obviously, there’s some things
(like annotations) that have to be in comments, but do you sacrifice clarity of a comment for a method name that you can basically read
like a novel?