Comments on: PHP Developer Best Practices

By: Hodicska Gergely

Hodicska Gergely — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 10:50:53 +0000

THX for sharing the slides: great work. A few comments:
- I prefer TAB over space with a little rule: use TAB in the beginning of the lines, and use space after. This way every developer can use his own indentation width and the look of the code is consistent. Of course this needs a little more discipline from the developer.
- I missed a little mentioning creating convention related to the database too. There could be a lot mess on this level too. (table name: plural or not, PK: id or user_id, index/trigger naming convention, “design patterns”: using the same data types in the same situations, field naming convention: is_ for bool etc., query formating and a lot more).
- “Learn to design for testability”: a very important point and unfortunately this one is not really covered by PHP books.

By: Kevin Day

Kevin Day — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:09:05 +0000

Great slides. It finally convinced me to integrate testing into my development procedure. Thanks!

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:54:07 +0000

Distributed VCS without a mention of Mercurial? That was surprising. Great presentation, although I was also surprised that you left off the Drupal project’s coding standards which are prominent. I think I finally get TDD now, and I’m going to see how I can use in (SimpleTest) in my business’ CakePHP app.

By: Mike Naberezny

Mike Naberezny — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:21:40 +0000

Yes. Most users treat a tag in Subversion as a snapshot in time. Once created, the tag is not modified. A new deployment milestone will be a new tag. Using the export command instead of checkout prevents the repository information (.svn directories) from being created.

By: Vid Luther

Vid Luther — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:48:14 +0000

Great presentation/Slides Mike and Matthew, too bad I couldn’t make it to actually see it in person. I had one question.

Why do an export from the SVN tag?, why not a CO of the tag? Is it because ideally once something is tagged, any maintenance fixes etc, will be done to a different branch, and hence a new tag will be created?