In response to another blogger's review of the php|architect "Guide to Programming with Magento", Michael Kimsal has posted some clarifications.

Starting off with "However, I'm not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book" I wasn't particularly surprised that there was more of a focus on negatives rather than positives.

Michael mentions three topics - the "first to market" point the reviewer makes about different versions of Magento between the book being authored and the release, some of the missing information the reviewer would've liked to see and the complexity of the example module that the reviewer complains is too hard to follow.

Felix Geisendorfer is taking an interesting approach to defining programming in this new post to the Debuggable blog - he's coming at it more from the level of the perception the programmer has about writing good code.

I believe understanding the patterns in your own thinking will by far make the biggest impact on how good you will get as a programmer. Forget design patterns, forget unit testing, forget all those functions you know. Important is to question why they exist and how they could be improved.

He illustrates through a few examples what he means. He describes one such thought method, the "return home early" process - basically, if something looks too complex for its own good, it probably is. He offers a different way of thinking about it too, a more visual way that can help simplify things even more by laying out the pieces and seeing where they all fit.

In relation to a recent announcement from Sebastian Bergmann about the inclusion of Cyclometic Complexity testing in the upcoming PHPUnit release, Jacob Santos has taken a look at its use - find the C.R.A.P. of a process.

The Change Risk Analysis and Predictions (CRAP) index is to give some idea how difficult it would be to maintain the code base. It is not to be used in evaluating how "beautiful" the code is.

He had to modify things slightly in PHPUnit to get it to work with entire files/functions, but it was still simple to use the testing software to create each file's CRAP index. For his examples, he chose the WordPress code and includes the code he used for the tests - two functions: getCCLevel and getCrapIndex. The results of the report are also included.

Sebastian Bergmann mentions today about a feature in an upcoming release of a popuular unit testing tool for PHP, PHPUnit - the addition of more software metrics.

The upcoming 3.1.6 release of PHPUnit adds a couple of software metrics to the data that is stored in PHPUnit's test database. Among these metrics is the Cyclomatic Complexity Number (CCN).

An example of how the CCN works is shown in the post giving the className, methodName and the complexity ranking given for the combination. His example shows the rankings for a part of the eZ Components software.

According to this new post on Chrisopher Jones' blog, Oracle has listened to it's PHP users and is implementing something in the 11g version of their database they've been asking for for a while - connection pooling.

We're interested in how users might configure and use the connection pool in PHP and other tools. This will directly influence the configurability vs complexity of PHP's OCI8 implementation.

They're also looking to add an attribute into the php.ini file to see whether or not the server needs to disconnect at the end of an oci_close or not. Stay tuned for more information as it comes up about this cool new functionality.

On the Gentoo blog today, there's a note for those just getting into PHP - a warning of sorts for them to not read too much into the language.

Stuart Herbert advises those coming into PHP, both from other languages and as a first language, to not expect things to be overly complex. PHP is all about simplicity, and he reminds readers with a few points about objects in PHP.

His three points are:

• Classes and inheritence are not new to PHP 5
• Managing state between pages is very straight forward in PHP
• Folks who follow design patterns religiously are missing the point

And that's the beauty of PHP over many of the other tools that you have. If you want to write a system that's entirely object-oriented, you can. But you don't have to. You can create and use objects where they make sense, and you can continue to use global functions where they make sense. PHP's neutral philosophy gives you the freedom to just get on with it, and do what's right for your needs, your skills, and your tastes.

Unit testing in PHP applications is growing more and more in popularity, so much so that some developers get into it, test all of their code and aren't exactly sure when enough is enough. Jim Plush has a suggestion for those kinds of testers - consider the cyclomatic complexity.

It's one of the most common questions you ask when you first start using Test Driven Development or Unit Testing in general... When am I done?

It's the point you feel confident when all your tests exercise the code in your classes. How do I know when that point is? I've come across a new way of finding this point using something called cyclomatic complexity. Developed by Thomas McCabe in the 70's cyclomatic complexity is a simple measurement of how complex a piece of code is. One of the nice parts of it is that you can use it when working with unit tests.

To illustrate, he gives a simple example of a function with only a function call and return inside. This has a cyclomatic complexity rating of 1 (the lowest). Now, start adding in ifs, loops, and other ways for the data to go and you start adding more complexity levels. Jim suggests that this can be another useful unit testing measurement - one more unit test for each level of complexity.

He also notes a pleasant side effect of this sort of classification:

The other nice part of a CC number is you can quickly find out when a method is ripe for refactoring. If you have a method with a CC number of 20 you know you most likely have a problem on your hand.