New in the Ibuildings blog today, there's a post from Ivo Jansch talking about using a pluggable architecture to help make your applications more robust and simpler to maintain. One key to this is the introduction of data sourcing.

The first versions of most projects are self-contained applications. They work as-is, without any connection to other applications. It often isn’t until a later release that there is focus on interoperability. [...] While this is an important steps toward application interoperability, there is often an important step missing. Most interoperable applications lack one final feature that allows full seamless integration: data sourcing, or the ability to get the data it needs from elsewhere.

He talks about two types of data sourcing - synchronization and federation (pulling the data as needed). He also gives a few examples of implementing this method in your application in things like your framework's models, abstracting out protocol connections and using web services (SOAP, REST) to make the connections. He also briefly touches on a very important topic to keep things in line - standards.

Joshua Thompson, inspired by another blog post on a use for the PHP tokenizer, has started off on a new project to expand on one of the examples - a preprocessor.

It makes a lot of sense for the library developer. They could easily create multiple versions of their code depending on PHP version, target platform, backend database, etc. So I started working on my own implementation of a preprocessor with the goal of making it easy to add plugins for additional functionality. It was during the construction of the core of the preprocessor, that it hit me: why can't we implement new language features in the preprocessor.

As a result, he's created his first version of PPP - PPP PHP PreProcessor (yes, recursive). It's a starting point that has a plugin for traits handling and a soon to come plugin to reduce the need for namespaces.

Antony Dovgal has pointed out a set of benchmarks from Ilia Kantor comparing several templating methods in PHP - eighteen of them in all.

He has the page set up to where you can run your own benchmarks and see the results, making the settings like variable count and interactions easy to change. Included in his list of templating methods to test are things like:

• php_templates
• smarty
• vtemplate
• phplib
• Sigma

Some comments on the settings for the templating systems are included as well (like the compiled template caching of Smarty and Sigma).

Antony Dovgal has pointed out a set of benchmarks from Ilia Kantor comparing several templating methods in PHP - eighteen of them in all.

He has the page set up to where you can run your own benchmarks and see the results, making the settings like variable count and interactions easy to change. Included in his list of templating methods to test are things like:

• php_templates
• smarty
• vtemplate
• phplib
• Sigma

Some comments on the settings for the templating systems are included as well (like the compiled template caching of Smarty and Sigma).

The latest issue of php|architect magazine has been released today - the March 2007 edition. Articles in this month's issue include:

• A look at Pluggable Authentication Modules by Mikael Johansson
• Jonathan Stark's review of FileMaker for PHP Developers: Part 2
• a look at the Active Record pattern in PHP from Dirk Merkel
• and the two usual columns from Ilia Alshanetsky (Security Corner) and Jeff Moore (Test Pattern).

Check out the details on these and the rest of the great articles in the issue here where you can also buy either just a copy of this issue or subscribe and get a full year of PHP goodness from php|architect.

The latest issue of php|architect magazine has been released today - the March 2007 edition. Articles in this month's issue include:

• A look at Pluggable Authentication Modules by Mikael Johansson
• Jonathan Stark's review of FileMaker for PHP Developers: Part 2
• a look at the Active Record pattern in PHP from Dirk Merkel
• and the two usual columns from Ilia Alshanetsky (Security Corner) and Jeff Moore (Test Pattern).

Check out the details on these and the rest of the great articles in the issue here where you can also buy either just a copy of this issue or subscribe and get a full year of PHP goodness from php|architect.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has created yet another tutorial surrounding the Cgiapp2software and looks this time at something he calls "pluggable applications".

He gives the example of needing a method for creating a well-structured layout in his appication, but also needing a sitewide template to apply to it. Traditional methods don't quite lend themselves to that, so he introduces a new function, cgiapp_postrun, to apply the template after the logic is through.

He includes two examples, one demonstrating the above mentioned situation and the other showing how to make a flexible method for including authentication in only certain parts of the application and not others. Both define a postrun() function to handle the changes to be made after the rest of the logic has finished.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has created yet another tutorial surrounding the Cgiapp2software and looks this time at something he calls "pluggable applications".

He gives the example of needing a method for creating a well-structured layout in his appication, but also needing a sitewide template to apply to it. Traditional methods don't quite lend themselves to that, so he introduces a new function, cgiapp_postrun, to apply the template after the logic is through.

He includes two examples, one demonstrating the above mentioned situation and the other showing how to make a flexible method for including authentication in only certain parts of the application and not others. Both define a postrun() function to handle the changes to be made after the rest of the logic has finished.