In this edition I talked with Ian Barber @ianbarber who is a developer advocate for Google+. Ian has been working with PHP for Virgin in the UK and has an amazing run of experience in the PHP world; delivering presentations at a number of conferences - his recent talk entails "Building a Firehose" at [PHP Tek 12 @mtacon].

In the interview Ian answers questions about:

• How he got started with PHP
• What he considers the good/bad parts of PHP
• The tools that he uses for his development
• Which user group he's a part of
• Some of the things he's learned being a part of the PHP community

You can read the rest of the interview here.

The fact of the matter is that today they [Zend] are stuck with a job they never asked to take over: They are the only PHP evangelism organization. So if you want to get some material on how to "sell" PHP to your Java loving IT department, Zend is the only real option to turn to. So we have to thank them for filling this void for now.

emPHPower is looking to replace that with a more diverse range of developers and companies that can provide details on a wide variety of PHP-related topics (including using PHP in the enterprise and the best open source solutions for different needs). He's looking to work with more of the regionally-focused PHP sites (user groups?) to help get things up and running in the beginning and then branching out to "the masses", possibly via other means.

How many people are really reading through all mails of 100+ message threads? It's going to be a chaos. Always. Once a developer has got his new, shiny and soon-to-be-world-dominating extension into the core, he'll be a even stronger advocate of the "no-new-extensions" camp. Not to disrespect any work, but this is pure rivalism, masculine - really!

When asked it the phar extension will make it into the core, Mike usually responds with "Never" simply because of the issues surrounding the personal feelings of those that would be involved with the merge.

IBM DeveloperWorks has an article titled "Check your PHP code at every level with unit tests" that suggests unit tests for PHP code at the module, database, and user-interface levels and proposes IBM not only uses my software, but also advocates it.

You can find out complete information on PHPUnit from the project homepage and about unit testing from here.

Inner Classes are contained in parent classes and offer a sort of namespace mechanism for the public and open private class data transfer for private subclasses.

The functionality is already available in other languages, but the question is whether it is needed in PHP. The short answer is no. With PHP execution model, it would further slow down and bloat PHP compilation.

He demonstrates their purpose with some simple examples but also gives the reasons why it would be a bad thing to try to include them, including the better choice of namespaces over inner classes.