There is currently a heated debate spawned with the creation and subsequent announcement of a more or less final decision made by a select group of people at php|tek. Now I am a friend of openness, but I have a hard time remembering any significant existing project within the PHP community that actually changed its coding guidelines. For all I know the main CS in the PHP world originated in the Horde project, but adopted and expanded by PEAR, got adopted and expanded by Zend Framework. See the pattern?

Looks like there is hope yet for the owners of the MySQL copyright to bring around their development. There is a proposal (actually it seems its already decided to ahead with it) up on their public wiki that details a development approach that could finally become compatible with the real world, rather than managers checking off feature lists. Maybe its too late already, but maybe its just in time to "fend off" the increasing competition for who provides the best MySQL distribution.

The main project I have been working on for the past year, never had automated testing. I must admit I am not a testing guru and none of the other people on the team were experienced. Furthermore I am not that convinced of having to change all of my code to be more testable or that everything that isn't easily testable is necessarily wrong anyways. For the most part the application consists of various callable methods that do some sort of SQL queries, ranging from a single one to a series of highly complex dynamic queries. Personally I am not a believer in maintaining SQL dumps that map to returned data, I want to query the real database. I also felt that making the various methods all unit testable was going to make the actual code more complex. So I really wanted functional testing, but I didn't see an efficient way to do this.

I am currently working on adding the dependency injection container solution that Fabien created as part of the Symfony2 components effort to the okapi framework. Looking at what Fowler has to say he does not seem to be all that fond of such containers in general. But he seems to say of at all, you simply have a single service container class with static methods, which you then essentially have to hardcode or in the words of Fowler: "the decision between locator and injector depends on whether that dependency is a problem". So for Fowler things would look like this:

Yesterday we finally released RC2. It took much much longer than I had hoped. Several reasons played a factor here. For one it seems like people needed a bit of a breather after RC1 to work on other stuff. More importantly we found two large problem areas, one of which is hopefully fixed, the other one patched with a hack for now. But given the large amounts of other fixes and the fact that TestFest is running in full steam with several European User Groups set to meet tomorrow, it was high time we put RC2 out there. I am really happy that TestFest is continuing this year. More importantly when Zoe took over the leadership she made sure that we learned from last years mistakes. Things seem to be running much smoother in her hands than they did last year in mine. All the User Groups have also given their input and so its clear that this years TestFest will be bigger and more productive than last years by far! Obviously the commitment from each of the User Groups is vital to the over success.