[development] PHP Standards Group

[larry at garfieldtech.com]

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