According to this new post on the Typical Programmer blog, using getters and setters in your scripts only adds in a bit of unnecessary coupling and complexity to your scripts that you just don't need.

Today most of the popular programming languages support objects, limiting scope, modularity, passing by value, and sophisticated built-in types. There should be no reason to deliberately expose an object's data to the rest of the code because the language can enforce encapsulation and data hiding.

While not specific to PHP, the post does recommend against them because of one simple reason common to all languages that make them possible - they "break the encapsulation OOP offers". For them, they're like a cheat to get around bad coding practices and are not needed to make a successful application work.

As anyone who's been developing applications (web or otherwise) knows, there are certain things that you just don't do when you're doing things like adding features or changing the code of a production application. There are some general rules to follow and this new article on the PHPClasses.org website reminds us of just a few.

This article describes software development practices that have been used to prevent problems that can break Web sites.

Included in his list are things like:

• Handle unexpected conditions Test your code
• Monitor your site errors and act upon them
• Do not disclose errors to the users
• Do what you can as you can never get defensive enough

He also recommends two resources for some additional reading - the Wikipedia entry for "defensive programming" and a chapter from Getting Real (from 37 Signals) about how to "Get Defensive".

Despite the release candidates for PHP 5.2.0 marching on, Lukas Smith still has some misgivings about some of the functionality being introduced in the release - specifically about the fatal errors that are going to break a lot of (working) object oriented functionality.

Anyways I just posted the following email to internals in a list attempt to get some of the people with php-dev karma to lift their finger.

In the message, he notes the change he's looking for and a suggestion to get it included before RC6 of the series gets released (which has been released as of this post already).

On cyberlot's blog today, he mentions some additional backwards compatibility bugs that PHP 5.1 and 4.4.1 are adding into the mix.

As of PHP 5.1 and in seems 4.4.1 are adding another BC break one that could break anyone using a object based database library within there custom session handler, and also make any registered shutdown function useless if it relys on objects, although the bugs focus on the session aspect of things.

This isn't something you can just "Document" away like they are trying to do.

Basically they are saying any user made or PHP made object is useless during the shutdown phase of PHP.

I could definitely see this issue causing some headaches for a lot of people out there. For more information on this issue, check out the bug report he refers to...