Monday February 06, 2006

I've annoyed PHP enthusiasts, friends and colleagues alike, with my distaste for PHP. There's nothing intrinsically bad, buggy or poorly performing about PHP per se. It's real simple: a lot of PHP code that I've had to pick up the hood on is a mess and is susceptible to worlds of instability and bugs. The common symptoms I see are mixing business logic, undeclared variables and globals, display code and SQL all scrambled up along with a complete absence of automated tests -- an intractable mess as soon as you want to refactor it. Sorry, my PHP-loving friends, it's nothing personal. I've used PHP longer than most of you. In 1995 or thereabouts it was a refreshing change from Perl CGI's with "print" statements. But now, I frankly don't get all of the zealous passion that PHP proponents have. I'm sure some of the suggestions I've heard ("turn off globals in php.ini", "read Sterling Hughes", "buy PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice", etc) are all good. I'm sure there are PEAR contributions that are legible and well factored (though, there are those that are not). But all of that misses the point. I'm confident that I or someone else could eventually derive a tool set that meets a rigorous standard for maintainable code. What concerns me are the prevalent practices and establishing best practices. I want to work with the someone else to establish them.

OK. So if it were upto me to establish best practices with PHP, what would I do?

Well, for one, I'd insist on using PHP classes with clear API's. I hate seeing PHP code with a long list of require_once statements, all of which can bring new functions and globals into the current scope. When files are used as grab-bags of functionality, when you're asking yourself "Which included file provided this function or that function? Rewind to read the source code and remember it..." you're in a World of Hurt. Better to define a class, instantiate it or call its static methods. I've been accused of writing PHP code that looks like Java. Well, I'm not sure if that's a disparagement but I think it was intended to be. Thank you very much!

I think PHP has an equivalent to Perl's "use strict" pragma. Gotta have it. Also, I think PHP 5 has exceptions. Gotta have that, too.

I'd use frameworks to encourage a separation of concerns. Either use an existing one or invent one if none of them are upto the task. On my list of things to look into:

• CakePHP
• Smarty
• Mojavi
• Horde
• PHP-Controller

I'd insist on unit testing. I don't know anybody using PhpUnit but I'm willing to be convinced that it's good. Tracing without random writes to error_log (or worse) is also a must-have, proper use of log4php is probably the ticket.

What am I missing? What are the best practices when programming with PHP? Any experts with these topics, come talk to me. Technorati is hiring.

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