In a move to generate interest in my upcoming article for International PHP Magazine on “Enterprise PHP Coding Standards”, the magazine has released this teaser article providing a glimpse into the issues involved. PHPDeveloper picked up the story and cited the major issue as, “coders who just don’t care enough”–when in fact I think a lot of it really has to do with PHP coders not having been introduced to best practices and seen the impact it can make. At some point in every serious coders career they run into someone else’s spaghetti code–but how to refactor it into something useful and better yet avoid repeating the mistake is a topic I feel needs greater awareness in the community. Hence this article.
Updated: 22 February 2005
Good stuff! I look forward to reading the actual article when it gets out in print. I think enterprise coding standards is a serious enough topic that the community needs to ruminae over, if it has to make headway into the decision matrix of project leads/managers in a large corporation such as ours.
Thanks to William Pietri for pointing out that Extreme Programming does advocate documenting an API (or anything else that merits documentation), no matter what more extreme interpretations of their precepts sometimes produce.
Thanks, Peter. It occurs to me that just about any serious PHP project can benefit from good coding standards — whether a major corporation (like yours) or a free open source project being maintained on SourceForge. As you say, it’s a good topic for the community at large.
Glad you liked the article — much more to come in the print edition!