In response to a few other posts about the use of "final" in PHP development, Freek Lijten has posted some of his own thoughts and some of the things he came to realize about its use in his own development.

I read a blog by Brandon Savage a couple of weeks ago and it triggered some thoughts. He refers to a blog by Marco Pivetta which basically states "Final all the things!". Brandon comes back with a more mild opinion where he offers the notion that this approach might be overkill. Since both posts got me thinking I tried to organise my thoughts on this in the following post.

Freek talks about a pretty common trend in the PHP world: the very rare use of "final". He suggests that "extension" of classes is a bad idea (or at least should be used a lot less) and how he has seen it commonly misused. He then shares two reasons why he thinks "final" is a good idea, mostly centering around how easy it is and how the Open/Closed principle applies. In the end, he notes that he'll be trying to use more "final" in the future and see where it takes him and his code.

Matthias Noback has a new post today with some of his thoughts about the recently released Symfony Best Practices book and some "unnecessary contrapositions" and things he sees that could help improve the perception of the book and the advice it provides.

Of course I'm going to write something about the new Symfony Best Practices book that was written by Fabien Potencier, Ryan Weaver and Javier Eguiluz. It got a lot of negative responses, at least in my Twitter feed, and I think it's a good idea to read Richard Miller's post for some suggestions on how to deal with an "early preview release" like this and how we can be a bit more positive about it.

He emphasizes the "staying positive" aspect of his message and points out that while some of the suggestions are good, they may not be the "best" in all circumstances. His main point, though, is that he thinks the way the book was introduced (the wording of the post) was unfortunate and cast a more negative light on the work done previously around Symfony best practices and advice. He recommends changing things around a bit in both the messaging and the book itself to take the focus away from the "you're doing it wrong" and encourage people to do it the way they recommend, casting a more positive spin on it all.

The web has been buzzing since Facebook announced their HipHop tool for PHP applications. Here's some of the comments and reactions people (and companies) around the PHP community have had to the announcement:

• The Echolibre blog
• Christian Stocker
• Brandon Savage
• Philip Olson
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Marco Tabini
• Chris Jones (Oracle)
• Terry Chay
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Stuart Herbert
• Vid Luther
• Stefan Koopmanschap
• SitePoint PHP blog
• Stanislav Malyshev
• Lukas Smith
• Stefan Priebsch
• the ServerGrove blog
• Shawn Stratton
• Jake Smith

Check back for more to be added to the list as they are shared with the community.