[Davical-dev] My thoughts about objects, authentication and other things...

[Wolfgang Herget]

Hi Matthias, Hi everyone else.

in order to not make this a quotation mess of what Matthias said, I'm  
just
gonna summarize his points and throw in my two cents.

 > (Object oriantation, classes and type hints)

I, too, would really appreciate type hints, that really makes  
development easier
(especially when using an IDE that has some sort of autocompletion).
As far as I understood it that means in order to have full hinting  
we'd need to
raise the requirement to PHP 5.1, which does not sound too bad, seeing  
as
5.0 is already a requirement.

Still, type hinting is (IMHO) rather half-baked because of PHPs  
untyped history,
most notably the lack of class variable and return value typing. It  
seems to be
(http://wiki.php.net/rfc/typehint) coming in the future though...
So far I've seen it done by PHPDocs "/** @return (typename)  
Description */", which
can't hurt.

> - About the autentication_hook.

AWL Already has AuthPlugin which might serve as a foundation to that.  
Refactoring
Auth sounds like a good idea to me (could also possibly done in  
parallel to
functionality changes), but as there are only few (i.e. ldap,  
squid_pam) plugins
concerned, not a very high-priority item.

> - Global configuration array $c

$c makes things really easy right now. In the end, you would probably  
end up with
a rather similar global Config class (maybe as a Singleton or  
whatever). I don't really
see much of a benefit gained from this, but I'm open to discussion. ;-)

Over to you guys. :-)
Best,
--
Wolfgang Herget