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. I get involved in conversations on Reddit (dangerous I know) on a mission to understand the problems with its perception throughout the community, and try to make more knowledge readily available to avoid confusion. I put together the PHP-FIG FAQ and the rest of the group voted it in, which I believe helped a lot. 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.

He goes through several of the points Tom made in his original post, pointing out places where the information was either misconceptions or just completely incorrect. He relates some of the autoloading suggestions Tom made back to things Composer can do and how this is different from "magic" on the part of the library user.

PSR-0 has its problems, but they are the two that I have pointed out and they are rather trivial. [...] If you'd like to add custom autoloaders to your Composer packages then go ahead. If you'd like to build your own custom autoloaders for all of your packages then you can do that too, but it ruins the entire purpose of what PSR-0 is meant to do. That's fine, because you don't need to use it, but I am happy as hell that PSR-0 exists and I wouldn't make drastic changes to it for anything.

[Frameworks] come in several different flavours that all have huge advantages, but also a few disadvantages. Over engineered (because their popularity demands that they be), updated too often, not updated enough. If you decide for example to update your application from using Zend Framework 1 to using Zend Framework 2, this will more than likely require, at least in part, a re-write of your code. This makes scalability difficult.

He talks some about the PSRs that the PHP-FIG group has proposed including the PSR-3 logging interface structure. He points out that, by having this same structure, it makes injecting dependencies easy while still leaving the actual functionality open to interpretation. He also suggests that maybe a framework isn't the right choice for all applications and that possibly using a collection of libraries, tied together by the PSR standards, could be a better answer.

First, I should state that I'm not a member of PHP-FIG. I applied to be a member representing the Elefant project, but saw projects with similarly-sized communities rejected, so I wasn't surprised at the lack of response to my application. However, I do agree with the general goals of the project and think it has a lot of potential if steered well.

He then spends a good bit of the post talking about the three PSRs (autoloading with PSR-0 and coding standards with PSR-1 & PSR-2) and how he thinks the PHP-FIG has some "public relations" issues they need to overcome as it relates to their reactions.

PHP-FIG has grown rapidly since its inception, and with that comes the need to reevaluate and adapt. The PHP community is huge, and a group hoping to represent even a substantial minority of it will have to practice diplomacy and clearly state its intentions if it doesn't want to be misunderstood or cause alienation amongst the wider community.

There's also some good comments on the post so be sure to check those out too.

I had high hopes for the group. It was the culmination of something I've been ruminating on for almost a decade (see post number 12 on my blog, dated to January 2004, for proof). My thoughts have mainly been around coding standards and best practices, helping educate developers around their benefits, and how to leverage both in order to create maintainable code.

He talks about some of the things he sees as shortfalls of the group including the definition of some of the standards (and interface structure), the current thoughts of changing of said standards and some of the "discussion" that happens in the group via the mailing lists and pull requests. He mentions that there were several times that the same discussions would happen all over again, despite people saying it had, and is tired of it.

I have better things to do with my time, things I want to create, software I want to support, hobbies and interests I want to pursue. Debating brace placement, tabs vs spaces (for the umpteenth time), or whether or not annotations have a place in programming in a dynamic language? Not so much.

The main goal is to allow libraries to receive a PsrLogLoggerInterface object and write logs to it in a simple and universal way. Frameworks and CMSs that have custom needs MAY extend the interface for their own purpose, but SHOULD remain compatible with this document. This ensures that the third-party libraries an application uses can write to the centralized application logs.

The implementation of this structure into your application makes it easier should you decide to swap out logging tools or want to create your own that can be used across several different frameworks. This is the third PSR to be accepted by the group, following PSR-1 and PSR-2 more related to coding standards.

PSR-3 is a proposed standard (voting has finished, it should appear as an accepted standard when the PSR folks recover from too much Christmas turkey) describing a common logging interface for PHP frameworks. It's based on a small subsection of RFC 5424, which describes the Syslog standard, which is a very sensible choice. Sysadmins think in terms of Syslog levels, and they utterly hate dealing with loggers that don't map cleanly onto Syslog.

He briefly introduces the PSR and the format of the logger with some of the main methods it should implement and what they do. He talk gets into some of his critiques about the proposal, namely the method naming, the exception handling parameter and the proposed LogLevel constants.

He mentions the ideas of "new thinking" and the limitations that standardized interfaces might try to impose on an application:

One is able to imagine reasons why having shared interfaces of the kind described above is in opposition to, or at best orthogonal to, better development practices and greater innovation across PHP land. Even so, I assert that shared interfaces as described, while maybe preventing an imaginable ideal in theory, instead promote an actual good in practice.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney responded with some of his own comments and correcting some of the misinterpretation of his original comments.

A little over a year ago, there was a new push by a number of folks wanting to do more. Paul Jones did a remarkable job of spearheading the next two standards, which centered around coding style. [...] And this is when we started seeing proposals surface for shared interfaces, first around caching, and now around logging (though the latter is the first up for vote).

He talks a bit about shared interfaces - what they are and what kind of problem they aim to solve - and how he's not sure he "buys into them". He notes that "sharing is good, developing solutions is better" and stresses making it easier to operate with each other and not worry so much about standardized interfaces.

He's found a few problems with the concepts behind them like the Not Invented Here (NIH) idea they promote and that there's not really just a single solution to these kinds of problems ("space for multiple implementations"). He suggests an alternative to the idea of these shared interfaces - bridges/adapters. He illustrates this idea with some code showing the implementation of a "CacheInterface" and a "FrameworkACache" adapter that wraps the functionality of a "CacheItem" class that might be internal to your application already.

Don't worry guys, this isn't another PHP apologist or PHP hater blog. We've all had enough of those recently. This is a quick heads up on two projects that are doing what they can to make the PHP ecosystem a better place.

He talks a bit about some of the recent work that the PHP-FIG has done, the new standards that were approved by the group (PSR-1 & PSR-2) as well as the launch of a dedicated website for the project, complete with a handy FAQ. He also points out the PHP The Right Way site and the loads of community contributions that have come in around it. There's guidelines for things like dependency management, security, testing, deployment and lots more. If you haven't gotten a chance to check out this resource, it's definitely work a look!

The FIG stands for Framework Interoperability Group. The name until recently was "PHP Standards Group" but this was somewhat inaccurate of the intentions of the group. [...] The idea behind the group is for project representatives to talk about the commonalities between our projects and find ways we can work together. Our main audience is each other, but we're very aware that the rest of the PHP community is watching.

The FAQ answers other questions about the standards the group has agreed on (passed) so far, who the members of the group are, how to get involved and how framework communities can get involved.