As a huge proponent of Composer, a happy user of PSR-0 and a voting member on the PHP-FIG I get into plenty of conversations about all of them, and it worries me how much confusion there is in the community about these things not actually being related. To many of you this will be preaching to the choir, but this will hopefully clear a few things up for many or at the very least be a handy resource to link people to when they show signs of getting confused between the two.
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While Composer has been around for a while now, many packages are still in their infancy (< 1.0) or sometimes are just not as feature filled as they could be. Pull requests are going to be a common thing for the PHP community to be doing to these packages and this needs to be done safely, with unit-testing. So, how do you run their test suite and add your own tests?
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Kapture is a Brooklyn-based company I've been working for this last year as Lead Engineer. We make an iPhone app which essentially rewards users for sharing a photograph of a specific opportunity with their friends on Facebook, Twitter or (coming soon) Foursquare. This at its most basic level means if I share a photograph of my food when I go to one of our partner restaurants, I could get a glass of wine, or a desert, or whatever that partner is doing, for free. Beyond that we have all sorts of people on board, from shoe shops to hotels, and plenty more verticals are covered too.
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One of the fun things about trying to support the PHP-FIG and all the good its doing, is seeing blog posts written complaining about it by people that just don't know what they're talking about. By getting involved in conversations on Reddit, building FAQs and generally trying to build new useful information this can generally be helped. Sadly some
blog posts are sent out by people with a whole bunch of odd opinions that you just can't do anything about, so instead I'm going to respond with a play-by-play approach.
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PSR-2 has been out for a while now, and even though developers from member projects (such as Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, CakePHP, Symfony and Zend) got together and took part in a entirely fair vote to decide if tabs or spaces should be involved, it soon became apparent that the group had made a mistake. Due to an overwhelming surge of complaints about the use of spaces for indentation instead of tabs in PSR-2, the PHP-FIG has had no choice but to reverse this decision.
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Which version of PHP to use for anything is always much debated in the PHP community. I'm luck enough to have kissed sweet goodbye to PHP 5.2 a while back, but PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.3 are both actively used by different projects and recently I have come across a few packages that have been using PHP 5.4 almost exclusively just to use short aray syntax, which to me is short sighted and selfish. I tried tweeting about this and everyone seemeed to be a little confused, so instead of 140 characters I thought I'd try 7051.
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Yesterday PHP.net announced the release of PHP 5.5 Beta-1. This is a great news after the concerns that merging Zend Optimizer would really slow things down, but the releases are still ticking along. So, what can you do to help out? Test it, without doing any work.
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This article is completely pointless, im just saying what everyone is thinking - just so we have a record of it. PHP is well known for having an inconsistent API when it comes to PHP functions. Anyone with an anti-PHP point of view will use this as one of their top 3 arguments for why PHP sucks, while most PHP developers will point out that they don't really care. This is mostly because we're either used to it, have a god-like photographic memory or our IDE handles auto-complete so it's a moot point. For me I'm not too fussed because I spend more time trying Googling words like recepie (see, I got that wrong) recipe than I ever spend looking up PHP functions. This is how we could fix the situation - but we never will.
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The world today has a lot of hot topics that need to be discussed. Washington needs to get together to help sort out the debt-ceiling to stop the US economy going down the drain, but the Democrats and the Republicans just cannot even vaguely get the conversation going because they are happy to just oppose each other until the end of time. Gun control is another hot topic, and I'm pretty sure the third-world is still struggling with debt and famine. But no, that stuff doesn't come close to the important conversations happening in comment threads of blogs all over the PHP community. Let's discuss what really matters.
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There are two kinds of PHP developers. Those who absolutely love static methods because they are easy to work with and those who think they are spawned by satan to test our devotion to proper programming practises. This article is not intended to explain why static apis are ok, I instead hope to use my experience with a few PHP frameworks - and the power of hindsight - to explain why some developers ignore best practises and use a whole bunch of statics.
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