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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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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I have referenced Shawn McCool's blog a few times, "Why CodeIgniter is Dead" and people are wondering why I argued so hard against it back in May but then gave CodeIgniter such a hard time in my last article. For the record I'm not team CodeIgniter or team Laravel, I'm a PHP user who has some opinions, and some of those opinions change over time - which is fair enough. My opinions aside, his original article was wrong on a few points, so let's discuss those.
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CodeIgniter was build a long time ago and since its inception it has maintained the same API, without making sizable breaking changes through 3 major versions. Sadly, the API is at a point where it needs to be rewritten to support several fundamental features, which most other frameworks support. This is a walk through those features with a little insight as to what why and how from an ex core contributor.
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You might not expect to hear that from a CodeIgniter and FuelPHP developer, but it's true. Taylor has done a brilliant job writing code that is clean, functional and has built a huge community of smart developers in less than a year of active development. People are flooding to Laravel from other frameworks and that's great for the PHP community, read on to find out why.
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Composer is the best thing for PHP since sliced arrays and using it in your applications means you have easy access to a large selection of well written PHP packages that plug and play with any framework that supports PSR-0 namespacing. This is BRILLIANT as it means less reliablity on the framework and framework-specific code, and helps you get towards the goal of portable code where the framework is essentially just the wrapper. FuelPHP will support Composer packages out of the box as does Symfony2 and I hear Drupal are working it in too. This interoperability is brilliant, but how do you use it with CodeIgniter?
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