Re: The future of PHP - PHP Pattern Repository

Miles > > Fascinating link and series of articles. Well worth reading. > > One of my VFP buddies copies his entire set of classes into every new > project he starts; I've also seen scenarios where to use one or two useful > functions you had to import a whole class structure. > Yes, I think he raises some very fair issues. My own experience goes like this - 1) Had a business idea and couldn't afford the software, so decided to learn how to build it myself. 2) Read "Code Complete" and did the first draft 3) Found I was getting drowned in complexity: assumed OOP would be the answer and that I might have to abandon PHP. 4) Read the OOP classics. I have a pretty strong academic background but I find a lot of the OOP stuff extremely difficult to understand. I have a rule of thumb that if an author can't explain something clearly, it is often because they are not clear about it themselves. Began to wonder if the OOP emperor had no clothes. 5) Began to suspect that it is the architectural ideas of OOP that are interesting, rather than objects themselves. 6) Played around with PHP and discovered I could do most of the same things more simply and more flexibly, organising the app around tasks rather than objects. 7) Found some writers such as Michael Jackson (his recent book on analysis is a classic) who gave a theoretical justification for what I was intuitively doing in practice. This is where I think a PHP Pattern Repository would come in - to allow the community to begin to flesh out and document these non-OOP approaches. But as there has been a thunderous silence, I have to assume that no one else agrees... Geoff Caplan