As Drupal is in the process of considering how to restructure code to best leverage the PSR-0 standard, I figured it would be wise to take a quick survey of how some other major projects organize their code bases. This is not a complete rundown of every project, simply roughly comparable notes for those areas Drupal is currently discussing. I am posting it here in the hopes that it will be useful to more than just Drupal.

The projects he looked to for his examples were:

• CakePHP
• Symfony2
• Silex
• CodeIgniter
• Zend Framework 2
• Composer

Zend Technologies addresses [the question of how a new demand for a new generation of apps] in Zend Developer Pulse, a new survey series that takes the pulse of a vibrant community of developers from around the world. The company's first developer survey conducted in late November 2011 offers insights on emerging technology and career trends captured from 3,335 respondents. The findings are summarized in a report now available at [http://www.zend.com/topics/zend-developer-pulse-survey-report-0112-EN.pdf].

The press release mentions some of the details from the survey including that 66% of developers will be working with mobile app development projcts, that next-generation UI deveopment scored high in skillsets, there was a strong interest in cloud development and that there's been a strong rise in the need for PHP development skills in the last year.

You can read the entire report here.

The survey showed that as much as 86% of developers listen to music while coding. Of the major music genres, 42% of developers said they prefer coding to music of the rock/pop variety.

The results also included the top artists, some "guilty pleasure" choices and some of the least popular artists. The full results of this survey will be coming out in January 2012, giving a "developer perspective" on the current state of the industry, technology in general and their career.

The anonymous survey is very brief - just seven questions - and should take no more than five minutes or so to complete. The survey is open immediately and will remain open over the weekend.

The seven questions on the survey include questions about framework usage, sets of how you feel about different framework-related topics, what editor you usually use (and for how long), how you usually interact with Git/Github. Go and voice your opinion now!

In Part I of this series, we started the process of creating user polls for a business web site. Part I gave the layout of the data layer and began the construction of the class file. In this part we will continue with adding methods to the class file that will enable the administrator to set the variable values and read from the database tables.

Code is included for setting the poll and answer ID values (setters), grabbing the number of polls currently defined, finding the active ones and pulling out poll data along with its answers. If you need to catch up, you can find the other parts here: part one, part two.

In the first two parts of this series, we created the data layer that will hold the polling data and established methods for setting the variable values and reading from the database tables. In this part, we will build the methods that will write new polls and answers to the tables.

They include the code for an "addPoll" method that inserts the questions and answers for the polls. Their "editPoll" method updates the poll questions/answers and the "addVote" method does exactly like it sounds - adding a vote to one of the poll options. Also included are "deletePoll", "activatePoll" and "deactivatePoll".

The Apache Zeta Components project is currently discussing how to adjust the old eZ Components release process to the ASF guidelines. During this discussions, quite some ideas came up on how the process could be optimized. This brought my interest to how users of PHP libraries would actually like to obtain library code for their projects. I will publish the raw results of the survey later, so all of the PHP libraries and frameworks can benefit. So please take some minutes and fill out the form!

The survey itself is embedded in his blog post, so you can fill it out right there on the same page. It asks questions about currently used libraries, preferred install methods and deployment methods. If you'd like a more direct link, you can go here.

Our server-side programming language survey shows that a very remarkable 74.9% of websites use PHP, slightly increasing in the last year. ASP.NET technologies (presumably mostly C#) come in second, and a few percentages are left for Java. That's about it. The variety of programming languages used to develop websites is surprisingly small, considering that everyone and his dog develops websites these days. There is a lot of talk in the IT blogoshere about alternative languages such as Ruby and Python, but their real world usage is tiny compared to PHP.

They talk about some of the contributing factors to these numbers including the wide use of various PHP-based content management systems, the balance of high traffic versus low traffic sites and some breakdowns according to operating system, geographical area and a hint at how their survey operates to find the systems using PHP.

This was certainly not a scientific survey and there were only 16 responses, but it still offers some insight that can be useful in planning user group activities. Here are the top reasons...

The reasons included things like "learning from peers", "meet the experts" and "finding job opportunities". He graphed the results showing that learning from peers and networking came out on top.

Those of you who follow me on twitter (@calevans) know that recently I asked for opinions on conference attendance. I've collected what I learned in this blog post.

He asked three groups of people - speakers, non-speakers and managers - for their opinions as to why they attend or send their developers to these events. his results were interesting, finding that slightly more people were looking for networking than just the training you get in the sessions. General community interaction also scored high. On the flip side, the things that mattered most to the managers were the training and a good price that seemed right for what was offered.

Both sides are reinforced by comments from people who submitted to the survey, both well-known PHPers and general community members alike.