Matthew Weir O'Phinney has two new posts that talk about something object-oriented developers seem to shy away from - globals in their classes and how they can make things more difficult to make "embeddable applications" a reality.

In my previous entry, I ranted about the use of globals in popular PHP applications, and how they make embedding said applications difficult. I develop using object-oriented practices, and can honestly say I can't recall ever having slung a global variable around in my own code. Globals seem hackish to me, and as a result, trying to get applications that use them to behave correctly has been a challenge.

In the first part, he notes an interesting find about the $GLOBALS value and illustrates with a code example how he was able to get around it in his instance (wrapping a Serendipity instance in a Zend Framework app).

In part two, though, and uses another code example to show what kind of issues he was seeing with the $GLOBALS - a script that sets some globals in different instances and echoes the results back out.