On the Ibuildings blog there's a new post that looks at the "evils" of a crucial part of many web applications - caching.

Recently a colleague stated that in theory, caching could be considered 'evil'. Now 'evil' is a very broad term which is used a lot in the IT community, but what does it really mean when we're talking about technical solutions? I asked around, but couldn't find a clear cut definition, so I went searching...

In his search he came across a wide range of definitions, including one mentioning bad design or implying a lack of goals with a summarized meaning of "does harm to your aesthetic and engineering judgment". He applies this to caching and, because of it being a sort of counter-intuitive way to handle content (not just the pull and push), it could be considered slightly evil. Interesting interpretation...

However, as anyone will tell you caching is a very necessary evil. [...] So while it does some minor harm to aesthetic and engineering judgment, the user gets a fast experience, which is really all that matters in the end.

On his blog today, Vinu Thomas has an example of what he calls a "quicker and cleaner form" using the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework.

Usually handing forms involves coding the form in HTML and performing client and server side validation, which usually makes the code for complex forms quite unwieldy. Zend_Form which is available in Zend Framework version 1.5 aims at simplifying this process.

With this new version comes the ability to add in methods for validation right into the form definition. His example shows a traditional login form that checks things like if it's required, checking the length and adding filters to modify the input.

Roy Ganor has posted a new article on the Zend Developer Zone about code refactoring, what it's good for and how it can help you and your code.

At first, refactoring seemed to me to be magic, over the years I have come to view it as more of a trick, and today refactoring is integrated into my development environment and used frequently and quickly. Using the refactoring functionality, in addition to other tools, I can sculpt the code to improve legibility and maintainability.

He talks about why PHP developers should jump on getting to refactoring their code, the different forms of refactoring, code examples showing it at work and some development tools/resources you can use to dig a little deeper.

David Coallier has posted his look at the namespace support that will be included with PHP6, specifically some examples of their basic usage and things to look out for when using them in your applications.

Well, PHP has namespaces now! Time to start educating people on that long awaited feature and for the people that already do know namespaces from C++, you also need to read this, it's simple, but will give you the basic syntax.

He starts with things like "what is a namespace?" or "what are they used for?" before getting into the syntax. The next step up is explaining how they work - he uses an example project, ProjectOne, with its namespace definition and an example script (invoke.php) that uses this class (including the new "import" keyword and the double-colon namespace separator).