Fabien Potencier (creator of the Symfony framework) has a new post on his site continuing his look at Symfony 4. In this latest article he looks at some of the best practices to use in the next major release of the framework based on some of the architectural changes coming down the line.

Any major version of a project is an opportunity to revisit its best practices. Modernizing them. Adapting them to the project's new features. Symfony 4 is no exception.

He breaks it up into a few different sections offering tips around each, just to get you thinking about the path ahead with v4 releases:

• Standardization first (using more standard tools)
• Bundle-less Applications
• Environment Variables
• Unified Web Front Controller
• Makefile
• Assets Management

Each item includes a description of some of the changes coming and what behaviors you'll need to modify to make life smoother in the Symfony 4 transition.

Ralph Schindler has a new post to his today looking back at a sort of history of autoloading and some of what we've learned even in just the journey from PHP 5.0 to 5.3 (and has become best practice in the community).

It wasn’t until years later that certain best practices had emerged and the prolific usage of require_once/include_once throughout large bodies of code had started drying up. Even after autoloading had been adopted by larger more visible projects, a common patten had yet to emerge. [...] Fast-forward to today, and we see that this standard for autoloading has agreed upon by a large number of projects and has come to be named the "PSR-0 autoloading standard".

He covers some of the things we (the development community) have learned about autoloading and resources in our applications. He talks about the classmap tool that Matthew Weier O'Phinney developed (and some of its downfalls) as well as a move into PHP namespacing that has helped to make some of the "namespacing" based on class names obsolete. He's noticed a pattern in namespacing already - a self-contained structure that provides more of a "drop in" solution and how that's handled in the code.