So what do we in the PHP world do for QA'ing our applications? Just trying to get an overview of what people are doing to make sure I am still in the loop of whats happening.

I gave a talk on this a while ago and I thought I should revisit the topic once more. I still do not have a final solution, but some things have become more clear in my head. At least I feel that it would be a good idea to write my thoughts down in an attempt to see the level of clarity I have attained on this topic. With this disclaimer out of the lets dive into the topic.

I have been waiting for a phone worth buying since about a year. Initially I wanted an FSC Loox T830, but then I got all worried about Windows Mobile sucking on the phone end of things, so I switch to waiting for the Nokia N95. The phone promised to have it all: Symbian OS, large screen, wifi, bluetooth with A2DP, USB 2.0, GPS, 3D gfx, TV-out, microSD hotswap, 5 megapixel carl zeiss camera, small form factor.

So as one of the last speakers, I finally got the opportunity to hold my talk on PHP6. You can find the pdf in my slides section as always. I was actually positively surprised that the room was fairly full, considering that I had seen several people head off to the airport already. I first asked how many people are still on PHP4 and a fair number raised their arms. Anyways, for some reason I felt that I was not speaking as fluent as I can, so I am a bit disappointed with my performance as a speaker. The slides however are probably the most complete resource for people who want to mentally prepare themselves for PHP6. One note of warning though: During my talk I noted that any of the changes/features listed can be reverted/dropped (remember how namespaces was dropped when PHP5 was already in beta) and some items are more likely to happen than others.

I am just wondering, where are all the PHP5 CMS? We have tons of very mature PHP4 CMS. And yes some of them even work on PHP5, but honestly those for the most started in the days where code design in the PHP scene was not well established yet. Unit testing was only for the paranoid and coding styles were optional. Of course these PHP4 CMS have tons of features and thats probably the "problem" as well. They grew one by one without all of the above mentioned ways of controlling their growth. Because of their size, it would take huge efforts to get anything remotely close to them in terms of features which makes it essentially not worth it to cleanup and rewrite things for PHP5.