Cyclomatic and NPath complexity explained

If you happen to be using PHP Mess Detector (which you should for any larger project) you have probably stumbled upon these two, but do you really know what they stand for? They sound really scary, but they’re basically fancy words for quite simple concepts. So let’s go through them and also find out why they’re important for maintainable and testable code. Both of these concepts are used in static code analysis and are measurements of how complex a function is.
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VIM color scheme for PHP: candystripe

I switched over to VIM as my main IDE for quite some time ago. One of the things that bothered me was that I couldn’t find any good looking color schemes. So I decided to put something together myself which ended up in my first color scheme for VIM with some specific colors for PHP when used with the right plugins.

Check out candystripe in the github repository nerdklers/vim-phpcolors for download and installation instructions. There’s more →

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PHP book recommendations (not for the novice developer)

To me it’s essential as a developer to read books, and not just looking things up on the internet. The depth of a book can not be compared to almost anything you find on the web. Keeping your knowledge fresh is important and I tend to try to read my books as often as I feel like it and have the time. What you learn by reading a book once is nothing compared to reading it perhaps two or more times.

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Worrying trends in PHP frameworks

To me there’s a trend going on in the area of PHP frameworks, whether it’s supported out of the box or some third party extension. There are two trends in particular that worries me and they are magic methods and ORM. What they’ll do is, on a small scale, make your life as a developer easier which is kind of sweet. But in the end you could be left with code that is hard to maintain and sometimes even hard to understand.
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