In one of his recent posts Phil Sturgeon talks about what he calls the "Attack of the Clones" on Packagist. In this case, he's referring to the number of packages that all pretty much do the same thing, just in slightly different ways.

n the last article I said I wanted to write about when its a good idea to release a component. A lot of this comes down to: is there one out there that does what I want, and if so, can I use it. This blog post is going to touch on a lot of points already made well by Anthony Ferrera. His article Reinvent The Wheel! says many of the same things, so if you only have time to read one article right now, go and read that. I've been talking with various people on Twitter about how I see a lot of people building what I consider to be clones. [...] It should go without saying that I'm not trying to quash innovation; I just don't think building identical shit over and over again is innovation. I see people wasting their time, and I know that time could go to better use.

He talks about how he's not opposed to innovation and development for the sake of learning, but that often the packages released are lower-powered versions of already established, well-tested packages. These kinds of packages can clutter the results when the packages are searched and prevent developers from finding the best fit for what they need. He mentions frameworks, but doesn't dwell on them as they're a bit more "self-contained" than just packages. He also touches on the curation of packages (guiding people to the right ones) as a possible solution and looks at how some of the other communities out there handle this same problem.

PHPClasses.org has posted the latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series - Episode #33, "PHP Innovation Award Winner of 2012".

he PHP Programming Innovation Award Winner of 2012 was announced. An interview with the winner, Karl Holz from Canada, was one of the main topics of the episode 33 of the Lately in PHP podcast conducted by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert. They also discussed the usual batch of PHP topics of interest like Zend Optimizer+ source code that was released, the PHP 5.5 feature freeze and roadmap, as well an article that compares PHP to an Hobbit, as well other languages to Lord Of The Rings story characters.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the recording. You can also subscribe to their feed to get this and other episodes as they're released.

PHPClasses.org has release their latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast today highlighting an opinion that PHP is losing popularity to other languages like C# and Python.

[Manuel Lemos, Ernani Joppert and Rochak Chauhan] also discuss the latest developments of the TIOBE programming languages ranking. The latest numbers seem to suggest that languages like Python and C# are gaining popularity supposedly at the expense of an apparent loss of interest on PHP.

The ranking their referring to can be found here. You can listen to this new episode either through their in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. There's also the complete transcript if you'd like a text-only version.

PHPClasses.org has announced its latest winners for the PHP Programming Innovation Award, and have highlighted one of the classes in particular - the Image Nudity Filter - as worthy of some special recognition.

Once in a while, a class appears to be not only innovating, but also does something unusual and extraordinary.

This month the winners of the award August edition were announced. The most extraordinary class seems to be "Image Nudity Filter" by Bakr Alsharif, despite it reached only the 2nd place in the month award ranking.

The class analyzes an image and rates it according to the probability that it may contain nudity. This is especially useful for sites that might need to keep things more "family friendly" but still allow users to upload their images.

PHPClasses.org has announced its latest winners for the PHP Programming Innovation Award, and have highlighted one of the classes in particular - the Image Nudity Filter - as worthy of some special recognition.

Once in a while, a class appears to be not only innovating, but also does something unusual and extraordinary.

This month the winners of the award August edition were announced. The most extraordinary class seems to be "Image Nudity Filter" by Bakr Alsharif, despite it reached only the 2nd place in the month award ranking.

The class analyzes an image and rates it according to the probability that it may contain nudity. This is especially useful for sites that might need to keep things more "family friendly" but still allow users to upload their images.