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Showing posts from May, 2012

Writing a Minimal PSR-0 Autoloader

An excellent overview of autoloading in PHP and the PSR-0 standard was written by Hari K T over at PHPMaster.com , and it's definitely worth the read. But maybe you don't like some of the bloated, heavier autoloader offerings provided by various PHP frameworks, or maybe you just like to roll your own solutions. Is it possible to roll your own minimal loader and still be compliant? First, let's look at what PSR-0 mandates, taken directly from the standards document on GitHub : A fully-qualified namespace and class must have the following structure \<Vendor Name>\(<Namespace>\)*<Class Name> Each namespace must have a top-level namespace ("Vendor Name"). Each namespace can have as many sub-namespaces as it wishes. Each namespace separator is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR when loading from the file system. Each "_" character in the CLASS NAME is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . The "_" character has no special

Doing a 180 on Grid 960

I've never been a fan of CSS frameworks; They just seem unnecessary to me. Every project can benefit from a reset.css file and maybe basic typography styles, but a whole framework? Meh. Then I read an excellent argument in favor of grid-layout frameworks in some book which I've since forgotten the name of and changed my mind (a tremendous feat indeed). I decided I'd make use of a grid-layout framework in my next project. I chose Grid 960 for the project since that was the one mentioned in the book, I had heard about it before, and it seemed to me the most mature and stable. My experiences with Grid 960 weren't bad per se... I mean, it didn't sour me back to my original mindset... but a few points will have me looking for another framework. The extra markup required is basically reminiscent of tables. Instead of <tr> or <td> though now you've got <div class="container_12"> and <div class="grid_3"> . Borders

Are Coding Standards Futile?

Unless the visual layout of a program's code affects its execution, there will always be programmers who circumvent the established coding standards. I admit, I've done it myself from time to time. There's no scientific survey that such standards really reduce cognitive friction when reading someone else's code as far as I know, and aesthetic matters are generally subjective. Make the argument for tabs over spaces until you're blue in the face; someone will just come along touting the benefits of spaces. I warned achieving a consensus on PHP Coding Standards as PSR-1 would be difficult and that the group's efforts would be better spent discussing more "meatier" topics, such as object caching. Two months later, the proposal failed to garner enough votes for a simple majority and has now been split . And let's not forget the "Beat Up on Crockford" festival over bootstrap and JSMin . His comments were a bit harsh, yes... but then again h