As more and more businesses (including Category 4) take up the use of the computer language PHP 5, then those of us programming in PHP have more need to consider object oriented programming patterns. Support for object oriented programming was weak in PHP 4 but is robust in PHP 5. One issue that becomes important [...]

I haven’t yet used Substruct so I’ve no idea if it is any good. But in an earlier post I said that before I use any framework, I need to know what the philosophy behind that project is, and so I appreciate that Substruct has a whole page devoted to explaining just the philosophy behind [...]

Some fellow posted a commerical notice to the comp.lang.php newsgroup. For a mere $79 per developer, you can get a PHP framework that does all the same stuff as the free, open-source PHP frameworks. And it has all the same problems, too. In a previous post I was ranting about generating HTML from the PHP [...]

I could probably learn a lot by re-reading Tony Marston’s article comparing his web application framework to Ruby on Rails. Marston’s work is always careful and well thought out. He describes his framework in detail and he is able to justify the decisions that he has made. He makes good use of well-known and successful [...]

Brian Lozier offers some interesting remarks about Smarty and the use of PHP in templates: Why do I say Smarty has it closest to right? Simply stated, because Smarty’s goal is “the separation of business logic from presentation,” not “separation of PHP code from HTML code.” While this seems like a small distinction, it is [...]

In my last post I tried to articulate some of the things I’d like to see in a PHP framework. Youngj posted a comment and suggested that I try Qcodo. I have a problem with Qcodo’s template system, and it is a problem that I have with a large number of other PHP frameworks: HTML [...]

A “web application framework” is a bundle of code that is suppose to help web designers/programmers build web sites. The framework usually takes care of some setup tasks, and helps make some complicated tasks easy. At this point in time, the framework receiving the most hype is Ruby on Rails. As the name suggests, it [...]

Ryan Tomayko has posted a convenient lay-explanation of the REST style of software architecture in the form of a dialogue between himself and his wife. No word on why he was talking to his wife about such a thing.

Dappit.com is the home of an impressive new application known as Dapper. Their tagline says it all: “…A new service which makes it easy to extract content from any website.” Once you choose a site you want to scrape for data, Dapper walks you through each step of naming fields, shaping your output and bundling [...]

Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson are writing a book comparing Web Services to RESTful services. We want to restore the World Wide Web to its rightful place as a respected architecture for distributed programming. We want to shift the focus of “web service” programming from a method-based Service-Oriented Architecture that just happens to use HTTP [...]