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 [...]
Looking forward to 2007
January 4th, 2007Why is PHP Code Considered Hard to Maintain?
November 9th, 2006Tobias 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. [...]
PHP as a Deployment Platform
November 4th, 2006PHP has been incredibly successful as a deployment platform for web applications. The WordPress blog brags that the WordPress 2.0 series has been downloaded 1.2 million times.
However, PHP as a platform is far from homogenous. With many different versions installed and the vast configurability of php.ini, there can be a great [...]
Dependency Injection in PHP
June 26th, 2006The June issue of PHP Architect is out. My column this month is on dependency injection, a topic which I’ve been warming up to lately.
First there was CORBA. Then insane complexity of CORBA was supplanted by the intolerable complexity of EJB. Influenced by an agile mindset and the power of Unit testing, [...]
Programming Language Trends via Google
May 10th, 2006There is a new google toy as of today: Google Trends. So of course, I wanted to see how PHP is faring on the trendy landscape. Here is a comparison of PHP, Java, C#, and Perl:
PHP Java C# Perl
PHP seems to be holding steady, or slightly declining. [...]
Extreme Simplicity
March 1st, 2006Could this be the manifesto of “Extreme Simplicity?”
10 fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology:
More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
You can’t make things easier by adding to them.
Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
Style matters
Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a [...]
The Evolution of Design Patterns
January 31st, 2006Rebecca Wirfs-Brock suggests that it may be time for the GoF Design Patterns book to be refreshed. She points out that the C++ and graphics programming examples may be less relevant to today’s C# and Java programmers. She implies that state of the art has advanced in the twelve years since the book [...]
Delicious Outage Link Dump
December 19th, 2005Del.icio.us has been down for a while. I use it for my public bookmarks, which are listed on the side of this blog. Here is a post with some recent random things that I would bookmark if I could.
The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts – “The Java hyper-enthusiasts have left the building” (along [...]
Language Peeves
November 6th, 2005Phil Ringnalda grinds his teeth when people say depreciated instead of deprecated. I know how he feels. The one that bothers me is hearing people say orientated instead of oriented, as in “object orientated.”
Code Coverage, Feedback and Open Source
October 4th, 2005I’ve long wondered about the quality and extent of the PHP test suite. During my posting hiatus, John Coggeshall addressed my question by posting a coverage report generated by running the test suite. Unless I am mistaken, he also implies that the report will at some point become automated and available at http://cov.php.net/. [...]
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