Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

As Mike already noted, he and I are presenting a session on "Best Practices of PHP Development" at this year's Zend Conference and Expo. It has been my fortunate experience to work with Mike in the past, and, as he noted, we had so much fun presenting during last year's conference, we thought we'd do it again.

The session is a pre-conference tutorial session, running for 3 hours on Monday morning, 30 October 2006. Currently, we're shaping up the session into the following subject areas:

• Programming Practices
  • Coding Standards
  • Test Driven Development and Unit Testing
  • Project Documentation
• Tools and Processes
  • Software Configuration Management (SCM)
  • Collaboration tips and tools
  • Deployment

Emphasis is going to be on working in teams, particularly those operating in geographically diverse areas. With roughly 30 minute blocks per topic, we've certainly got plenty to cover!

If you're coming to the conference, we look forward to seeing you in our session!

As noted previously by myself and Davey, I've been working on Zend_XmlRpc_Server for some months now. In the past couple weeks, I've refactored it to push the class/function reflection into Zend_Server_Reflection, and, in doing so, noted that there were further areas for refactoring into additional helper classes. Currently, it now has classes for the Request, Response, and Faults, and all actual XML wrangling is done in those, making the server basically XML-agnostic.

As Davey Shafik noted recently, he and I have been working together on some web services for the Zend Framework. In doing so, I've become very familiar with PHP 5's Reflection API, and am coming to love it.

When I first read about the Reflection API in a pre-PHP 5 changelog, my initial reaction was, "who cares?" I simply failed to see how it was a useful addition to the language. Having done some projects recently that needed to know something about the classes they are using, I now understand when and how it can be used. It shines when you need to work with classes that may not be defined when you write your code -- any code that dispatches to other classes, basically.