In this new post to his site Matthias Noback talks about a topic not normally discussed outside of languages that support it natively - duck typing.

For quite some time now the PHP community has becoming more and more professional. "More professional" in part means that we use more types in our PHP code. Though it took years to introduce more or less decent types in the programming language itself, it took some more time to really appreciate the fact that by adding parameter and return types to our code, we can verify its correctness in better ways than we could before. And although all the type checks still happen at runtime, it feels as if those type checks already happen at compile time, because our editor validates most of our code before actually running it.

[...] think that nowadays many PHP developers agree that silent type conversions is not something which is very useful, nor safe. But sometimes it's good to remember what's possible with PHP, due to it being a dynamic scripting language.

He goes on to give an example of the flexibility of PHP and how the most basic functionality usually provides the most "loose" level of abilities. He talks about type enforcement, limiting interfaces and the things PHP does natively to help keep it simpler instead. He then introduces the duck-typing-library package and what it offers to help you run validation against values to ensure they're correctness and type.

In this post to is site Andrew Smith refutes the misconception that version three (v3) of the Slim PHP microframework is "not so slim" anymore with some of the additions to this latest version, increasing it's size and complexity.

There is a common misconception that Slim 3 has plenty of files and is no longer slim. Slim 3 does indeed contain more files than Slim 2 and this has been the result of being more flexible and moving away from the Not Invented Here (NIH) philosophy.

Installing Slim 3 through composer will install all its dependencies, when doing a PHP file count you will notice we have doubled in file count. This is a given with the amount of flexibility we now have. Most developers might not see any benefit in this as they will likely just work with what is provided, but if at any point you should hit a limitation in any working part of the framework, you can easily swap it out without a fuss.

He includes the command to install this latest version via Composer and how to count the number of files with a single command. He points out that some people that are reporting 1000+ PHP files being installed with the framework are probably getting the development packages as well and not just the release. He points out that "Slim 3 is still slim, we just added more flexibility in it." He ends the post with a thanks to Josh Lockhart and a few others who have made large contributions to the project and have helped make it what it is.

On the Symfony Finland blog they've posted a look at Symfony's past, present and future in terms of its structure and goals of stability and flexibility. This also includes some of the origins of PHP itself and how it evolved to the stage where creating framework made sense.

I like to think of modern PHP frameworks as glue to put together components to form something that is more than the sum of it's parts. [...] The Symfony Framework is a standard way (and framework code) to create applications using components. The application is always built with a specific structure, which allows code reuse of complete functionalities (Bundles in Symfony lingo) across projects. If you build using a collection of components, you'll need to invest time in learning how that software has decided to use the available components.

He talks more about the idea of components and how they make up a greater whole (like Symfony) and how they relate to the idea of "bundles". He then looks forward to the future of the framework, its long-term support and its work towards being fully PHP7 compatible.

The combination of the PHP language at 20 years and the Symfony framework at 10 years offers a stable platform with flexibility to adapt and grow in the future.

In a new post to PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore takes a look at a popular content management system from EllisLab called ExpressionEngine. He gives an overview of what it is and what it has to offer over some other CMSes out there.

Indeed, I concluded that no solution effectively offered both the fundamental features of a content management system and the flexibility of a web framework. However , after working with ExpressionEngine (one of the systems I recently highlighted in my article "The Top Five PHP Content Management Systems"), my opinion on this matter has fundamentally changed.

He mentions the hundreds of features included in ExpressionEngine, how it handles content management, templates and includes a powerful member/user management system. He also talk briefly about the plugin system with over 140 offerings currently available and more and more being added all the time.

In a (somewhat sadistic) example of why he loves the flexibility that PHP offers Manuel Pichler has posted a code snippet showing just how much PHP can bend.

While working on PHP_Depend's parser I realized one major reason Why I love PHP, it's the flexibility of language. Even if you think you now know all ways to solve a problem, there is always one more way to solve it.

At a high level, the code example does some crazy things with variable variables, magic functions and constants to ultimately output "f:bar()".

Sometimes power comes at a price - you get benefits from the added features and functionality, but you can lose something else along the way - the simplicity that brought you in originally. Federico Cargnelutti takes a look at a tool that can do just that - the Zend Framework.

Don’t assume that just because you’re using an object-oriented framework you are writing reusable and maintainable code. You are just structuring your spaghetti code. [...] The main problem with flexibility is that most developers give up trying to understand. I don’t blame them, no one likes dealing with complexity

TO illustrate, he gives two code snippets from two example developers - Developer A makes full use of the framework and takes a more compact approach to the problem while Developer B adds in a bit more checking and takes a different path to the same (basic) end result.

With all of the frenzy in the PHP community surrounding the issue of frameworks, more and more articles on the subject are showing up - including this new post from the Utah PHP User Group site, a look at CodeIgniter.

We all like the productivity of Ruby on Rails but most PHP frameworks don't seem to be quite right - some are too complex, some not stable enough, some not supported by ISP's, etc. I've now tried most of them and my conclusion was to follow the "stupidly simple MVC" series to just write my own code in a simple way but with some structure.

But I noticed several posters to that blog series mentioned Codeigniter as a great way to go with sort of the same philosophy. And today it was mentioned in Planet PHP. So I checked it out today, Wow! - it is really, really nice.

John Taber, author of the article, shares his opinions on the framework mentioning its simplicity and flexibility. He also briefly makes reference to a "simplicity similarity" to the Zend Framework.

With all of the frenzy in the PHP community surrounding the issue of frameworks, more and more articles on the subject are showing up - including this new post from the Utah PHP User Group site, a look at CodeIgniter.

We all like the productivity of Ruby on Rails but most PHP frameworks don't seem to be quite right - some are too complex, some not stable enough, some not supported by ISP's, etc. I've now tried most of them and my conclusion was to follow the "stupidly simple MVC" series to just write my own code in a simple way but with some structure.

But I noticed several posters to that blog series mentioned Codeigniter as a great way to go with sort of the same philosophy. And today it was mentioned in Planet PHP. So I checked it out today, Wow! - it is really, really nice.

John Taber, author of the article, shares his opinions on the framework mentioning its simplicity and flexibility. He also briefly makes reference to a "simplicity similarity" to the Zend Framework.