Larry Garfield has an interesting set of benchmarks covering many of PHP's magic methods. His results correspond pretty well to my own benchmarks in the area. The thing to take away is that its not necessarily the overhead of the magic methods, but rather what you do inside them. Its hard to [...]
A quote from Cal Henderson (via simonwillison) presents a "Web Application Scale of Stupidity:"
| OGF (One Giant Function) ---- Sanity ---- OOP (Object Oriented Programming) |
The scale that Cal is talking about is actually better known as modularity:
| Few large modules ---- Sanity? ---- Many Small Modules |
If you haven't listened to Alan Kay [...]
There is a coding pattern that I see (and have used) in PHP code that defines generic methods on a class for setting and getting properties.
function set($name, $value);
function get($name);
Google code search for examples
Some times there are some ancillary methods to deal with unsetting, checking for existence, setting via an array, or dealing with references in [...]
Travis Swicegood has a post questioning the value of the docblock. I have a deep sympathy with this sentiment.
Even on projects with extensive generated documentation, I find that kind of documentation to be of extremely low value. The problem with inline API documentation is that there is no sense of priority. Developers [...]
Matt Mullenweg has a post about Hiring Diversity. A successful software project must fulfill many competing goals and factors and meet a wide variety of challenges. Diversity is the combined arms of software development. In my personal experience, the diverse team performs better. A diverse team allows the [...]
Chris Shiflett has a post today, Allowing HTML and Preventing XSS. The problem is how to allow users to format their contributed content without introducing security vulnerabilities. The answer is usually some sort of markup language or filtering and sanitization of HTML.
BBCODE was designed for this purpose. There is no actual standard, [...]
I have to comment on this week's annoucement of Delphi for PHP. I was a Delphi programmer for about 5 years before taking up PHP about 6 years ago. What a convergence.
I have a great fondness and respect for the old Object Pascal based Delphi. Delphi's VCL has been influential, inspiring the [...]
I ran across an interesting series of blog posts by Karsten Wagner claiming that OOP is dead (part 2 and part 3). The premise behind these posts is that OOP has failed to deliver and that it is on the decline in favor of more functional or meta programming techniques. Maybe its true [...]
Well, I'm finally back in town after the holidays. Let me tell you, I'm glad to be home. Between multiple holidays and taking my grandma to her cancer treatments in Ann Arbor, I was gone far too much of last month.
My Grandma is doing well. They used an experimental new procedure called [...]
Tobias Schlitt describes Tim Bray's talk at the International PHP Conference. (PDF slides) Tim compares PHP, Java, and Rails along several dimensions. One of those dimensions is maintainability. Tim ranks PHP as least maintainable, Rails in the middle, and Java as most maintainable.
This is not a surprising ranking. [...]
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