August 5th 2004

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Members meeting on 05/08/2004

Our regular meeting - basically a monthly PHP PubCon - which is held on the first Thursday of every month.

Meet PHP users, professional developers and recruiters near you! Come to PHP London's August 2004 meeting to exchange ideas and talk about code, architecture, innovation, and open source in general. Anyone interested in PHP is welcome!

Where and when

The Cambridge from 7pm onwards.

Who will be there

Feel free to add your name if you're coming! Everyone who does so, links to their wiki profile page (copy the coding format of other names on the list - if it is displayed in red then you've not linked to a page that exists), and actually attends, will be entered in a random draw for a prize of £10 of drinks/food from the venue (started June 2009, still popular in summer 2010...).

Apologies for absence

If you wanted to come but can't/couldn't, feel free to explain yourself!

  • Jesse Walker - I'm away in south France (near Toulouse) for my summer holiday and will be back on the 9th of August ;)

Agenda

I'd like to try an experiment. I would like to try about three people in a ten minute exercise (each person privately) in gathering requirements on a mythical web project. We can have fun comparing them afterwoods. What I am actually after is a realisation of how differently we all think. The fun would really start when we try to come up with a better way to gather requirements. Anyone game? --Marcus Baker

Sounds like a good concept, I'm up for it. Will bring the laptop as usual, any requests please let me know at the usual address. --Demian Turner

You could put PhpDoc on, if it isn't already. Joshua might be able to give a talk on it :) --Marcus Baker

It's on, latest stable version, ie: 1.3.0RC3, also have SimpleTest, we have a small suite happening for Seagull now :-) Do you have a PEAR tgz version for download? --Demian Turner

No PEAR version of SimpleTest as Harry Fuecks has stopped contributing (that damn WACT thing). All the necessary package information is there on SourceForge if you want to build it. I can even sign you up on the project if you want :). --Marcus Baker

Does anyone have any experiences with debuggers they can share? (Komodo, Zend IDE, phped, etc.) Maybe even a demo? Also, I'm not sure if I'm confident enough to talk about that naughty '&' symbol used for referencing / variable aliasing. Entering the world of 'do I copy or do I reference can be minefield-like. If anyone's interested and would be happy to give a quick 5 mins on this, then I'd be happy to throw in my own experiences. Or maybe it's too simple a subject and not worthy of beer-time? (Can anyone see the relationship with point above mentioning debuggers?) --Doug Boit

Unit testing has killed debugging for me, so even though I use Komodo I have never set up it's inbuilt debugger.

The reference issue is trickier and is related to the notion of entity objects and value objects. Here's my standard explanation. At it's simplest, PHP will copy an object and then give it to you rather than give you the original. Imagine I have fifteen quid in the bank. If you ask me for my money and I do it by copy then I give you a one time snapshot of my finances, That is I give you fifteen quid. If I give you my bank account by reference I give you the one and only version. This means that you can keep taking money out of it in the future. You are still "connected" to it if you like.

Mostly you want to pass by copy (value objects) because it is simpler and less buggy. You don't want to pass a URL around only to have one part of the code changing it and secretly affecting another. Hidden connections are usually a bad thing. A certain proportion of your business objects will be entities though, such as Logins and Sessions and People. If you save a person at the end of a script, you want to make sure it is the same one that the rest of the script is working on. Entities have "identity" and having two copies of them bouncing around the system getting out of sync. would cause major headaches.

You know most of that of course. There is also the issue in PHP that references are not yet objects in their own right and so cannot be passed out of scope. There are special case semantics (the ampersands) for this, but really it's fakery. --Marcus Baker

The requirements exercise sounds a good laugh! Something I've done for real over a number of years - not so mauch of a laught when there's millions at stake... Count me in!

Also, now that PHP5 is 'official' (a lot earlier than I expected, but what do I know?) it may be interesting to hear from anyone who's been using it and hear their views on whether we *should* (note, not *have to*) re-write all our code. Any takers? --Doug Boit

I'd like to know if / how ppl go about performing code reviews, especially in small teams. Are there decent (read trustable) resources out there on the web that anyone would recommend and what's the process? build, test, review, iterate? ...or test!, build, test, iterate as Marcus might say and review at some agreed point? Congrats on the little un by the way ;) --Paul Morgan


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