Back in the spring, a group of PHP developers from several popular "pure
frameworks" got together and started a PHP standards working group.
Their goal was to standardize certain OO coding standards, in particular
the use of namespaces, across PHP projects, even if such standards
necessitated some changes in the participating projects' existing code
bases.
There was some fallout about the group being self-declared and trying to
establish project standards by fiat, with a number of people, myself
included, objecting to either the fait accomplis presentation, the
details of the proposed standards, or both. Eventually the core team
moved off to an invite-only list, and I largely lost track of them.
Yesterday, they decided they should invite in representatives from a few
other frameworks and projects, including Drupal. I discovered this when
I suddenly found myself on the list and getting messages, as I'd been
sitting in the pending membership queue for months. :-) So apparently
I'm now the "Drupal representative". Goodie...
So before I open my big mouth, to what degree are we interested in being
involved, and to what degree are we willing to play by the standards
this group develops?
Personally, I think we should try to do so where possible. It's good
for inter-operability, reduces the learning curve for PHP-knowledgeable
developers coming into Drupal, and frankly a lot of these people have
been working with OO PHP a lot longer than we have so there's much to be
learned from them. It also means that we can begin to shift ourselves
in the "right" direction for whenever we're able to drop PHP 5.2 and
rely on PHP 5.3 namespaces, which will open up all sorts of new and
exciting power and weirdness.
However, I'm not sure that we should commit to following the developed
standards, period. As of the last draft I saw, some of them would not,
I think, even be compatible with a modular full-stack framework like
Drupal to begin with, mostly regarding a universally-applicable autoload
pattern.
So I would like to go into the process with a statement of "we'll be
involved in developing such standards and will adopt them wherever
feasible, but we do not commit to following all standards if they are
incompatible with Drupal's basic architecture."
+1, -1, feedback, flames, recriminations, encouragements, death threats...?
--Larry Garfield
