Php

With the amazing buzz around RubyonRails, everyone seems to be hooked on the Model-View-Controller (or just MVC) paradigm – and do strive to mindlessly implement the ”Ruby way” into other programming languages without too much reflection and thoughts on how to do it. . Even tough most of the efforts I’ve seen so far seem pretty hopeless; I do believe you could actually do something good with MVC and PHP. Let me try to tell you how. My ”systems thinking” is usually in the ”large professional genre” and it’s an absolute requirement that the PHP code developed is Efficient, Secure and Maintainable. To get a decent shoot at these, we really can’t reuse ideas and ideologies from Java or Ruby into PHP – we must adapt them to the strengths, weaknesses and ”php ways” to get a good result.

Operation redesign - a secret behind the scenes project after the big crash of November 2004 - has been completed. As a visible result some of the pages now look somewhat different, but there’s more. The core foundation in the new design is ”NetFactory Tree” a home-brewed, not too fancy but pretty damn efficient site engine, which manages the design (sort of). It’s a fun mixture of database hierarchies, Smarty templates and other magic stuff – which almost work.

For all the PHP freaks, the number one PHP Company, Zend, has released a new version of their Zend Studio 4. It’s probably the coolest way to develop professional PHP applications and besides a load of new features it seems to be running faster.

David HH has an interesting piece on “The false promise of template languages”. While neither Perl nor PHP may offer the same clean syntax in the code as Ruby can do, it does indeed raise a few interesting questions about how actually benefit from the templates and who does in the space between designers and developers. I do love some degree of separation between heavy duty code and the interface layer, and usually work with HTML::Template or Smarty – they work and the penalty for using a separation layer seems to be the smallest possible (at least in a balanced performance/ functionality view).

A new group has appeared on the net – the PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC). It is an international group of PHP experts dedicated to promoting secure programming practices within the PHP community. Nice. While many PHP developers make sites people are supposed to use and enjoy, few as actual education and experience in how to make secure applications and websites.

Through projects and articles, they’ll try to educate PHP developers.