Something I’ve been hearing a lot of lately is how companies and individuals want to set the standard. This can be a market standard, a development standard, or another business “standard” that they want to share with their fellow developers.

This seems a slight contradictory statement at times as “setting the bar” seems to be selective - for example, when it suits the interests of the individual rather than the company or the audience of the standard. This grows more and more confusing because in most cases with day to day development and business practice, most individuals I’ve had recent experience with aren’t really market experts at all.

Scenario:

Person A: Let’s ensure that we do this feature for this reason.
Person B: But why? It’s less accessible for the user, it isn’t going to optimize our development, et cetera. (and justifiable reason will do, just make sure you’re not arguing the point because you’re lazy).
Person A: Because that’s what the market trend is directed to accept.

If one is going to undertake such an ambitious venture as setting a new standard, or raising the bar so that competitors follow suit, don’t try to pick and choose which standards you’re going to enforce simply because they apply to your personal goals while relying on the “all powerful market” to justify other decisions. If you’re going to try to be the standard, BE the standard. In the case above, it was a pick-and-choose decision making process, and one I hope that doesn’t cascade through the rest of the company’s ventures.

In other news:

I’m quite the fan of this article, Top 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. Definitely a must read.
Just a reminder that the Zend Framework 0.8 is out now - if you’re on the mailing list, you know that.

I’d like to thank (and by thank I mean through gritted teeth) Marco who has introduced me to another addictive site, Virb. It’s still in beta, but if you have an account, simply look me up (I’m the only Ryan Brooks that comes up in a search at the moment). I have to say, I’m quite impressed with it.

There’s another application called Ning which got itself an article on Techcrunch. Ning supposedly allows you to create social networking applications in minutes. I’ve seen applications like this over the years, and I hate to say it but I think this is yet another application that is going to fall short.

When developing with the Zend Framework, it’s been my experience that the majority of our class files have a myriad of require statements before the class declaration. There are cases where these requires are not needed.

PHP 5.2.1 brings us all sorts of new goodies, one of them being the method spl_autoload_register(), part of the Standard PHP Library. When we tie this in with Zend::loadClass(), we can load our class files as needed.

Though there is some question about problems with application servers and things like bytecode caching, this gives us the added benefit of enforcing consistency in class naming - with consistency comes predictability, and saves us from having to RTFM, or double check our directory structure every time to find the proper file.

Though I am using this autoload method, I want to make sure that it is not slowing my applications down - there is quite some heated discussion on using auto-magical methods versus carefully crafted include statements. I’ll be paying very close attention to my dispatch times, and time will tell if I continue using this method.