I suggest a more retro-active approach [than trial and error]. Studying, surrounding, and forcing yourself to abide by best-practice coding standards will yield surprising results in your applications despite the fact that it may seem like more work than it's worth.

Topics included in his list are things like:

• Always develop with error reporting set at E_ALL and E_STRICT
• Portability, Portability, Portability!
• Don't over-think!
• Validate & Sanitize your Inputs!

Check out the rest of the post for more suggestions and explainations.

BarCampMelbourne2008 was, simply put, AWESOME! BarCampMelbourne2008 was held at Thoughtworks [wikipedia] at 155 Queen Street, Melbourne on 23 Feb 08, and had approximately 60 in attendance.

She talks not only about the conference itself (the male vs female attendance, the presence of Apple laptops and the age of attendees) as well as her talk on the advancement of practices at her workplace and other talks like an intro to APhpLix and how to use PHP Under Control.

We had so much fun presenting during last year's conference, we thought we'd do it again. The session is a pre-conference tutorial session, running for 3 hours on Monday morning, 30 October 2006.

The session will be divided up into two different main sections - programming practices and tools and processes. Each of these have their subsections, including test drive development/unit testing, project documentation, and collaboration tips and tools.

The talks followed three topics:

• Best Practices - security, performance up to basic OOP features in PHP and debugging
• Object-oriented programming - "OO Candy store"
• and the ever-popular "Enterprise PHP"

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

He notes several of the things they used along the way, including:

• Design patterns
• Ajax
• Optimization
• Coding standards
• Extreme programming tactics

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory -- we did it.

At the request of a listener to past podcasts, Scott created this one to share some of his experiences and findings along the path of his develoopment. Some of the items covered in the podcast include:

• package and library management
• naming conventions
• the seperation of UI and business logic
• code distribution
• using test harnesses

You can download the MP3 of the podcast directly from here.

The second post is more of an overview of the conference, mentioning what a success it was - well-organized, good talks, plenty of help, good equipment, and great catering for speakers/helpers. The "flow" of the PHP room seemed to go well (from his comments), with only the hackaton being a bit lacking.

Congrats to all involved with this year's FrOSCon! Here's to hoping for even better times at the next conference...

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.

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.

Among his suggestions are included things like "use clear APIs in classes" and "use frameworks to encourage separation of concerns". He also suggests a more wide use of unit testing in PHP to help rid your apps of common issues...]]> Wed, 15 Feb 2006 07:30:06 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4676 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4676 Codewalkers.com has added a new tutorial today from Ligaya Turmelle that looks a "best practices" when working with PHP.

Best Practices-- What the heck does that mean? One definition returned by Google reads "processes and activities that have been shown in practice to be the most effective." What does that mean to you? These are things that work so use them! And while I will be discussing PHP specifically, these can be used in ANY programming language.

These simple guidelines will help make your scripts easier to read and understand (to you and the next guy), have fewer bugs and save you time. I guess the better question is why AREN'T you already using them?

They cover several highlight points, including "think before you code", "reinventing the wheel", and discussions of general things like Coding Style and Security...]]> Tue, 17 Jan 2006 06:39:01 -0600