Comments on: I’m having fun and breaking down barriers with PHP

By: hirsch

hirsch — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 18:31:24 +0000

For working with PHP, I would recommend two projects:
ADODB
smarty
ADODB makes sure that you are database independent. (sure you always use the same type of database until…)
Smarty does seperation for you. Build a smarty template in the templates file and away you go.
If you use a database well, I would recommend my version of phpcodegenie. With it, you expand it to a directory, make sure that you have smarty and adodb setup, ensure that you have configured your users name and password for a mysql database and then you can have it write code that uses the above and you just download it to your machine. (wget or curl does it for you)

By: Adrian Holovaty

Adrian Holovaty — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 19:11:07 +0000

Larger-scale PHP projects *can* be maintainable, but getting them to be maintainable is a pain — mostly for technical reasons such as the fact that PHP has only a single global namespace. For that reason, I’ve stopped using PHP completely — at home and at work.

By: Barry Parr

Barry Parr — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 17:03:56 +0000

I can’t argue with that. But in the pages I’m talking about the software is the content, and I do separate content from presentation as much as I possibly can.
I’m building single-function self-contained pages where the php isn’t a lot more complex than HTML, and it’s just as maintainable (for good or ill). But it’s genuinely interactive. Without php, it would be impossible for me or a lot of other individuals to do this.
I can’t address the suitability of php for large-scale programming, but I’m beginning to suspect that it can be done maintainably as well.

By: James E. Robinosn, III

James E. Robinosn, III — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 13:55:23 +0000

Barrier shattering, maybe, unmaintainable, definately. PHP is indeed very powerful, but you’d be wise to split function from presentation every chance you get.
For instance, everytime i need something out of a database i create two functions: one to get the data, one to format it for presentation. Its helpful too, in that if i need the data elsewhere i just need another function to format it differently.
HTH, James