Chatting with Flex

Some nice details about Flex runtime libraries and standardized XMPP chatting protocol.

Writing a Custom WordPress Plugin

An interesting read how wordpress developers implemented it’s plugin system. A worthwhile read if you are interested how a flexible plugin system could be implemented.

Case Study: A Million Products

Found the Entity-Attribute-Value aka EAV model very interesting. It has been mentioned in previous php|architect editions. It’s a great solution where business entities have lots of different attributes. The article shows a realistic approach  how EAV could be implemented.

The Perfect Storm

A trully great article worth reading! Reading the first few sentences i remembered myself in the past. Maintaining legacy projects .. I agree with the article that experience working with legacy projects gives you debugging experience. I’ve met developers who just get lost debugging old legacy code and spend hours and hours looking for a problem while it takes someone else just 5 minnutes to find it. Was interested to hear about the limited GOTO statement in PHP 5.3. The article introduces to one of the worst code smells developers should avoid: Pack Rat Syndrome, Real Clone Wars, Merging of Sins. Pack Rat is when dead code is left behind. Clone Wars is about code duplication. And Merging of Sins is about creating new projects from old ones without cleaning them up.

Nineteen Eighty-Private

Interesting argument. I consider myself a fairly educated developer and I’ve never questioned myself why I make the non-public members and methods of classes private and not protected. I came to a conclusion that libraries should be protected because these can be extended. In other cases where classes are not meant to be extended they should probably be declared final anyway.