What a lot of this boils down to is culture, or more specifically, lack of cultural awareness. I'm talking about making assumptions based on what a developer may personally hold to be true but in the broader global context is incorrect and often marginalises their audience. In the pursuit of a more globally harmonious online experience, let's take a look at 10 lessons relating to aspects of web development with a cultural bent. Some of this may not be new to you, but all of it is relevant if you want to play nice with people from all cultural walks of life.

Among the list of his ten tips you'll find things like:

• Firefox and Chrome command 91% of the market
• Almost always, 8/7 comes before 7/8
• Country code top level domains give context
• Time zones matter (and they're not universally understood)
• Don't deprioritise your international audiences

Check out the rest of the list in his full post.

Maybe it took the PHP community a little longer to realize the importance of testing. But now that we know how to build applications that "just work", are fast and scalable, as well as secure, a big topic in the PHP community right now is to implement processes and use techniques that help us assure that the software works correctly throughout the its lifecycle.

He points to some comments made at a recent panel discussion about PHP and testing, the proliferation of frameworks for the language and the things that have no name that developers use every day to make their code "just work".

Joshua Eichorn (among others) notices that active record can't work as shown in the Zend Framework webcast. The syntax presented during the web cast is not possible in PHP because of inherited static methods are treated. Mike Naberezny notes the problem and suggests that it will end up getting fixed in PHP, the sitepoint thread Trouble in Zend Framework Land?, 33degrees smells vaporware, and Elizabeth Marie Smith does too.

I look at this incident as an incredibly good omen. My optimism about Zend's PHP framework is not for the framework itself, but for what it means for OO support in PHP. In my book, the more developers that have commit access to both ZPF and to PHP, the better PHP 6 will be for me. I look at ZPF as an important step in building a culture of objects in the PHP community.

He continues, talking more about how object-oriented languages are still popping up right and left, and how PHP, at its core, needs an OO layer built on top to compare. He's not looking to belittle the OOP support in PHP, just to note that there's more work to be done - and the Zend Framework might be what pushed the development of that along...]]> Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:02:02 -0600