Phil Sturgeon has a post with several "developer fallacies" of 2014, a tongue-in-cheek list of things that some people were sharing as facts that just weren't.

Let’s take a look back at some of the silly, shortsighted or patently false things people have been saying around the PHP community, and the development community in general, starting from January 1st 2014 and going through in rough chronological order.

Included in his list are things like:

• No programmers ever get hired by recruiters
• Framework agnostic code takes drastically longer to develop and release than framework specific code
• Micro-services should probably always be .jar files instead
• PHP 7.0 is a better name than PHP 6.0 because 7 is lucky in China
• PHPNG is Zend’s response to HHVM and they are the same thing
• Maintaining CodeIgniter - when actively used by thousands of people - is a waste of time

Of course, all of these (and the rest of the list) are false and several of them are just based on things spread word of mouth or misinterpreted when shared from one person to another.

If you're a PHP developer and are working on distributed applications (or might be in the future), you should probably read through this new article on PHPMaster.com with 8 common fallacies about these applications and their needs.

These fallacies directly relate to us as PHP developers since we build distributed applications each and every day. We build mashups, applications that interact with SOAP and REST services, authenticate users via Facebook, Google, or Twitter APIs, retrieve information from remote databases and caching services, etc. Make no mistake, we’re building distributed computer applications. Given that we are building distributed applications, it’s important that we understand the eight fallacies and how they affect us.

Among the list of their fallacies are things like:

• The Network is Reliable
• Bandwidth is Infinite
• The Network is Secure
• There is One Administrator

Check out the full article for the rest of them and summaries of each.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new article/tutorial posted from Padraic Brady introducing you to the art of unit testing your applications and development.

Testing is an essential aspect of developing in any programming language. If you don't test your source code then how can you verify it works as expected? Manual testing can only be performed irregularly and usually only in limited ways. The answer to testing source code regularly, and in depth, is to write automated tests which can be frequently executed.

He talks about testing frameworks, its filtering in to practices on larger community projects, and a few fallacies that most people have about unit testing (including time involved, difficulty with complex code and that it's just boring). He also includes some examples of what a unit test might look like for some simple code - including explanations.

He rounds it off with some of the "why use unit tests" reasons he's found over the time he's used them like:

• Automated tests can be run as frequently as required
• Unit Testing can improve the design of code especially with Test-Driven Development
• Unit Testing forces you to confront the problem head on
• Unit Testing inspires confidence!

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new article/tutorial posted from Padraic Brady introducing you to the art of unit testing your applications and development.

Testing is an essential aspect of developing in any programming language. If you don't test your source code then how can you verify it works as expected? Manual testing can only be performed irregularly and usually only in limited ways. The answer to testing source code regularly, and in depth, is to write automated tests which can be frequently executed.

He talks about testing frameworks, its filtering in to practices on larger community projects, and a few fallacies that most people have about unit testing (including time involved, difficulty with complex code and that it's just boring). He also includes some examples of what a unit test might look like for some simple code - including explanations.

He rounds it off with some of the "why use unit tests" reasons he's found over the time he's used them like:

• Automated tests can be run as frequently as required
• Unit Testing can improve the design of code especially with Test-Driven Development
• Unit Testing forces you to confront the problem head on
• Unit Testing inspires confidence!