Gopal Vijayaraghavan has posted some opinions about the way that several of the popular PHP frameworks work internally, more specifically in their inclusion schemes.

In the development of things, there comes a point when it escapes the vision and control of one man/one mind. PHP frameworks are such ... beasts. But the simplicity a machine took away can be made to return. And such an attempt at zooming out of the complex file structure bureaucracy of most php projects was inclued.

He points to this image of the Zend Framework's structure as an example of the unneeded complexity several of the frameworks are guilty of (including CakePHP, Symfony and CodeIgniter).

He also includes a suggestion that could help keep the frameworks a bit more accountable:

Now, all that remains is a php-graphviz + svg mode which renders these in-browser as an iframe - or maybe someone can help me with the graph reduction to take a collection of the inclued dumps & create a "package".

Federico Cargnelutti has posted an interesting overview that graphically shows outlines for a few major PHP projects showing where the includes are coming from.

The includes of the system map out the dependencies of the system, which files depend on which, which subsystem depends on which. When working with a system, it's always useful to map out the dependencies before hand.

The software he's created the images for include WordPress, phpBB, and a few frameworks - Symfony, Zend Framework and CakePHP. He used the Inclued and Graphviz software to make the charts.

The php|architect guys have released the latest episode of their P3 podcast - the newscast for April 17th, 2008:

It truly seems we are cursed. Paul recorded this podcast at OpenWeb Vancouver, and even though he used the new iPod setup (to avoid the aforementioned USB/OSX10.5.2 problems), we still somehow managed to lose small chunks of the audio. *sigh*

Topics mentioned in this show include:

• inclued
• nowdoc
• traits
• and the PHP participation in the Google Summer of Code

Two ways to grab this new episode - directly (just the mp3) or subscribe to their feed and get this and other great (past and future) episodes.