Posted by Colin McKinnon on 09/16/05 11:31

David wrote:

> I found and interesting article, "Experiences of Using PHP in Large
> Websites" (http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/) ,
> which lists some issues with scaling PHP for larger projects. Worth
> a read although it appears to be three years old.
>

Not really - the article is rather badly written, poorly justified, and in
several instances just plain wrong. I find it remarkable that someone could
produce so many words about PHP development without mentioning code
testing. (see recenet thread here regards typing / variable declaration).

> The major issue I have had with PHP is a conflict in class names for
> modules created by two project teams. We resolved this by prefixing
> all class names with a module ID, ex. "ModuleName__<Class Name>"
>
> The only mistake I can see with this article is a statement that you
> can only have one php.ini per server.
>
> Who is using PHP for larger projects and how do you handle the naming
> issue?

I have about 600,000 lines of PHP here, 6 programmers and between 1 and 3
web designers. The servers field about 3 million requests/day. Is that big?

I use a similar approach - any global symbol in an include file should be
prefixed by the file name e.g. file transact_db.inc.php might contain fn
transact_db_ini(), class transact_db, fn transact_db_query(), fn
transact_db_diconnect()...

The namespace thing is an old chestnut in PHP circles. I had some time
recently to have a think about it and wrote my own namespace handler (in
PHP). Next time I have some time free I'll publish it somewhere.

The ,ost important advice I could give to anyone embarking on a large-scale
project using PHP would be:

- set strict style/naming guidelines - the PEAR ones are a useful starting
point
- use unit and integration testing
- don't worry about scalability - PHP has it in spades

HTH

C.

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