On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new post from Remi Woler, a perspective of his experience as a judge for the Eurpoean WinPHP contest.

I figured the judges would be busy as hell in the time between the end of the contest and the announcement of the winners. Seeing all those great contributions, I was actually starting to fear my days of DPC would be filled with application reviewing. It did not exactly turn out that way...

He lists out some of the major pros and cons he saw when reviewing the applications for how they met the goals of the project and tips for future participants in the event (ten of them):

• Don’t have all business logic in a third party application, and only write a nice GUI on top of that.
• Comment your code
• Collaborate
• Contribute to the community
• Do not ignore the existing wisdom
• Write manuals and how-tos
• Do not dishonor yourself when giving up
• Be original
• Make it work
• Participate

Lots of these tips can also be applied to any kind of software project out there and can only make them better in the long run.

With the passing of the end of 2008, another thing has come to a close - the contest being held for the best elePHPant photo submission at the ElePHPant World Tour. In this new post they talk about the contest and some of the prizes the winners (first, second and third places) will win.

2008 is over, which means the Elephpant World Tour is coming to an end! The contest that started in September got over 240 entries! That is a whopping 60 elephpant pictures a month. The PHPWomen, who we managed to convince to be the judges for the contest, are now going to sift through all the posts and select 3 winners

Prizes include subscriptions to php|architect magazine, a copy of Zend Studio Professional, a ticket to the Dutch PHP Conference and a license key for the Flex Builder Professional software (from Adobe).

Stay tuned for the list of winners when they're posted!

In this new post to his blog Chris Hartjes suggests a new way to judge frameworks - how easy they make it to write unit tests against them and their resulting applications.

As a project for work gets ready for an alpha release, I've managed to eliminate all the serious bugs and now have some time for what should've been part of the project from the beginning: writing tests. [...] Since I'm using Code Igniter instead of CakePHP for this project (did I mention that I inherited the project and couldn't switch?) I started looking into the culture of testing surrounding Code Igniter. It's weaker than a newborn baby.

He tried to find anything he could use to write tests against the CodeIgniter application and finding fooStack as an easy to use tool for the job. This was what made him wonder how other frameworks stack up in the "has good unit testing functionality" category. He briefly covers four of them - CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, CakePHP and Symfony.

So now when you start comparing frameworks to each other, I think it's important you also consider how much effort has gone into creating tests for the core functionality of that framework. A well tested framework should mean far less surprises when using it.

From the Programming Resources, News and Ideas blog (plentyofcode.com), there's yet another comparison article, but between three different languages this time - J2EE vs ASP.NET vs PHP on multiple criteria.

In this article, I wanted to compare the web application development platforms which I have been using for recent years. My comparison has no aim to make one platform better than others, or vice versa. These are all my own thoughts and what I have experienced during the development of web applications using the three platforms. It is open to you to express your opinions and stands as a comment.

They rank them on a three-point scale from 8 (good) up to 10 (best) and look at things like:

• Syntax
• Easy to Learn
• Platform
• OOP – Object Oriented Support
• Performance
• Support and Community
• Cost

PHP scored relatively high (nines and tens) on most things with the exception of "Syntax" because of some of its "odd characters" to work with objects and classes.

From the Programming Resources, News and Ideas blog (plentyofcode.com), there's yet another comparison article, but between three different languages this time - J2EE vs ASP.NET vs PHP on multiple criteria.

In this article, I wanted to compare the web application development platforms which I have been using for recent years. My comparison has no aim to make one platform better than others, or vice versa. These are all my own thoughts and what I have experienced during the development of web applications using the three platforms. It is open to you to express your opinions and stands as a comment.

They rank them on a three-point scale from 8 (good) up to 10 (best) and look at things like:

• Syntax
• Easy to Learn
• Platform
• OOP – Object Oriented Support
• Performance
• Support and Community
• Cost

PHP scored relatively high (nines and tens) on most things with the exception of "Syntax" because of some of its "odd characters" to work with objects and classes.

For those of you anxiously anticipating the results of the PHP programming competition put on by The Programming and Management blog, Nick Halstead has posted an update to help keep you up to date.

The judging of the PHP competition is taking a lot longer than I first thought! I started with 40+ entries which I reduced down by trying them one by one (very slow!) some of them quickly stood out and I got the list down to 12 entries. [...] I then went through those top 12 and re-tested more thoroughly trying out further words/dictionaries plus quick checks for robustness and quality of presentation. This then left me with 6 entries which I would then email out to the other Judges.

The final judging of these last six is dependent on how each of the judges rank the applications overall. Nick also includes some of the comments made by the judges already about the applications they're reviewing.

For those of you anxiously anticipating the results of the PHP programming competition put on by The Programming and Management blog, Nick Halstead has posted an update to help keep you up to date.

The judging of the PHP competition is taking a lot longer than I first thought! I started with 40+ entries which I reduced down by trying them one by one (very slow!) some of them quickly stood out and I got the list down to 12 entries. [...] I then went through those top 12 and re-tested more thoroughly trying out further words/dictionaries plus quick checks for robustness and quality of presentation. This then left me with 6 entries which I would then email out to the other Judges.

The final judging of these last six is dependent on how each of the judges rank the applications overall. Nick also includes some of the comments made by the judges already about the applications they're reviewing.

On his blog today, Stoyan points out a topic he's started over on the OpenSourceCommunity.org site - What do you think makes a good CMS?.

This year's Packt Publishing awards for the best Open Source CMS are on their way, starting middle of July. I've been selected as a judge in the PHP CMS category. [...] How can one judge something as diverse and liquid as a CMS? Content management comes in all different shapes, some systems focus on solving some problems and they do a better job than another CMS that mainly tackles different types of problems.

He shares the experiences he's had with CMS and companies that have rolled their own in the past as well as a small list of things that he's thinking about making "the standard" for the CMSes to be judged by. Also included is a lengthy list of requirements that he sees that need to be included for any decent CMS to move to the next level.

On his blog today, Stoyan points out a topic he's started over on the OpenSourceCommunity.org site - What do you think makes a good CMS?.

This year's Packt Publishing awards for the best Open Source CMS are on their way, starting middle of July. I've been selected as a judge in the PHP CMS category. [...] How can one judge something as diverse and liquid as a CMS? Content management comes in all different shapes, some systems focus on solving some problems and they do a better job than another CMS that mainly tackles different types of problems.

He shares the experiences he's had with CMS and companies that have rolled their own in the past as well as a small list of things that he's thinking about making "the standard" for the CMSes to be judged by. Also included is a lengthy list of requirements that he sees that need to be included for any decent CMS to move to the next level.

Elizabeth Naramore has posted an update about the PHP Throwdown event being planned, including updates on the judges, prizes, sponsors, and registration.

Many people probably think the PHP Throwdown has stalled, but it’s quite the contrary actually. We’ve been mulling over many things and have come to some conclusions. So if you’re interested, read on!

The judges have been found, the categories are still being decided, prizes are en route, Jupiter Hosting has stepped up as a sponsor for the event, registration is coming soon, and the rules have been posted.

Be sure to check out the main page for complete details on the event. The PHP Throwdown is a competition to see what can be accomplished with PHP in 24 hours. Who: You! You can compete in a team, or individually.