Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] PHP programmers need spanked!

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

>You're not hacking on osCommerce by any chance?
>  
>
Exactly. I'm starting to think that a complete rewrite would have been 
easier than trying to fix this code. I've seen a lot of other PHP 
programs that were programmed really badly though. MediaWiki (of 
Wikipedia fame) comes to mind too. Many PHP coders just either aren't 
very experienced programmers or they just don't care about the end result.

Personally I like sepperating UI and core logic with XML-RPC but you can 
do it almost as well just by cleanly sepperating your code into 
functions and objects that obey some reasonable naming scheme. PHP's 
allowance of inlining HTML is handy for short scripts but people that 
use it for major programs are just insane. Haven't they ever heard of 
using templates? :p

Seriously, by the time I fully understand all this tangled mess it'd not 
be that much more work to rewrite it. I've worked with OSCommerce before 
and it is ALWAYS a hassle. For something like an e-commerce package it 
should be especially important to have clean code as you want to be able 
to security audit it. I'd definately want to break it into a three-tier 
structure with each tier connected by XML-RPC. That'd really let your 
website scale too as each tier could be broken up across multiple servers.

As it is I've spent a huge amount of effort just fixing typos (that keep 
the program from working) and reformatting the code just so that it's 
readable enough to figure out what is going on. *sighs* Actual coding is 
only about 20% of the time I've spent working on this.

--
Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
http://kavlon.org

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