Gallery 2.0 Released

uss_valiant writes "From the Gallery website: "We are incredibly pleased to announce the release of Gallery 2.0! Over three years of design and development have gone into creating the best online photo management product possible. Gallery 2.0 is the natural successor to Gallery 1, and we hope that you like what you see. Don't wait, download Gallery 2 now!" From a developers point of view, the Gallery 2 framework is particularly interesting because it's written with modern programming patterns (OOP, extreme programming, test driven development, MVC, factories, modularity, ...) in mind which is rather unusual for PHP based projects. Over 1500 unit tests ensure correct functionality and its architecture is really impressive."

Comments

PHP != Crap Code

[ilkahn]

I have often remarked that a "Writing Maintainable Enterprise Class Systems in PHP" book would be the best thing since sliced bread for the PHP community. There is nothing so wrong with the language and the environment (although some have likened it to training wheels without the bycicle) that can't be remedied with discipline, communication, and the use of mindful quality software development discipline.

PHP has been a wonderful language in which to "put together quick solutions which grow into large projects" for me in fields from accounting to my current work in Industrial / Manufacturing! The interfaces you can write to control PLCs and generate plant floor intelligence using *good* PHP and a web server are light years beyond what is usually available on a shop floor with PanelViews and Vorne displays (Light bars...) Someone out there would be smart to write a PHP-for-software-engineering book.

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[ilkahn]

I guess that's sort of the point I wanted to make, is that with some foresight and proper discipline, those small projects, when they become big projects, don't need to be rewritten from scratch, if maintainability was in mind from day one. Take PEAR::DB or one of the more advanced O/R mapping PHP frameworks (such as Propel), throw a decent templating system on there (such as Smarty), keep your code highly cohesive and loosely coupled, and the benefits of the language and the libraries are *massive*.

I spent 4-5 years trying to get JSP to work as a "rapid development prototype to full scale application" environment, and I constantly ran into issues with Tomcat, Jasper, JAR file surprises, all of the warts that come with the Java language, etc... I switched to PHP for all "non-transactional" code when I did a study whereby I analyzed the amount of time it took one of my teams to react to "changing customer requirements" utilizing PHP/Apache as opposed to how much time it took another team of mine to react to similar requirement changes using JSP/Tomcat. I am not saying that JSP couldn't have worked, it's just that it seemed to not really have as many benefits as I would have liked for an environment that required as much agility as that which I found myself in.

I have to admit, my experience with ASP is nearly nill, as I have not been able to convince any clients to allow me to test out MS platforms controlling plant floor hardware.

All that being said, when my company writes something that requires "transactional integrity", we do pick Java for the backend... it's just that those situations in my field really are few and far between.

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[NickV]

You're comparing a decent templating engine (Smarty) with crap Java technology (JSPs.) Most modern Java programmers disdain JSPs and use other, better templating technologies. Try using Velocity . Requires no recompiling when you make changes and is a very very easy templating language that provides an amazing amount of power (you literally can drop items into a hashtable of VelocityContexts and then access them by using "$" notation... such as "$user.name") If you want something that will really rock your world, check out JSF or Tapestry (it turns web programming into writing an event-driven application, like desktop apps.)

The problem with most PHP applications is that they don't scale. I don't mean that in a "PHP SUXORS! YOU CAN'T WRITE S$!@ IN IT"... I mean that most PHP applications aren't built with any real caching implementations (like this gallery software, or phpbb, or nuke, etc...) and the PHP frameworks that I looked at don't really provide that functionality.

The stuff availble for Java is just so much more powerful. You have the Hibernate OR mapping package that provides an amazing amount of OR work for you, including the ability to plug in multiple transactional caches, session caches, database connection pools (including the ability to have clustered caches across multiple boxes.) You have complex messaging architectures to talk to and keep multiple machines in sync. You have great web service APIs and great search engines that can be plugged in. Stuff to that degree just doesn't exist for PHP.

It often shocks me to see so many "Enterprise Level" PHP apps released with no caching implementation... you shouldn't see ANY home page hit a database on every hit. (And yes, you can easily avoid stale content by eviction, injection routines.)

So yes, you can definitely write decent stuff in PHP. But for the highly scalable enterprise environment, the libraries and packages that exist for Java and ASP just don't exist.

The other thing I hate about PHP is that there just is no IDE that is of the caliber of Eclipse for PHP (and PHPEclipse just ain't there yet.) A professional IDE allows me to introspect objects, trace stacks, change variables on the fly per hit and control each thread individually. This kind of power makes debugging and performance testing so much easier and more powerful than a PHP app. Good luck trying to seriously profile a PHP app...

So yea, PHP has it's place. It's wonderful for quick one-offs. I just wouldn't want to code a massive user load, transactional, high availability, multiple machine cluster application on it.

Re:Big deal.

[DataPath]

unit tests don't just show that your program works, they show that your program STILL works (make great regression tests)

Give me a break.

[saberworks]

If this is an example of good PHP coding someone please shoot me. They use their own internal "require_once" instead of simply using ini_set to set the include directories correctly. They name all their included files *.inc and *.class which can be a severe security issue if these files are available from the web root (which by default they are).

From the code I saw, everything is extremely over-engineered (read: too freaking complicated). It looks like they have some input sanitization functions but they aren't used consistently.

The coding style throughout isn't consistent (but who cares?).

On the plus side, they have used PHPDOC or some similar syntax to document their classes and functions (makes for good API docs). They have used external libraries for some things like templating and database abstraction (can't say much for their choices but at least they didn't rewrite those from scratch).

The error handling also looks particularly nightmarish:

if ($ret->isError()) {
return array($ret->wrap(__FILE__, __LINE__), null);
}

(repeated 12 times in one 100 line file!!!!)