the Numiton blog - Responses

Re: Open-source Web applications, PHP vs. Java (Part 2 of 2)

Chris Guselle — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:40:13 GMT

I would also love to see a Java version of Drupal - I think there would be huge interest in this

Re: PHP bad practice: the use of extract()

Oscar Merida — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:04:23 GMT

The extract function has a very specialized use. And I agree it should not be applied to the alternative scenarios you outline at the end, which in essence deal with working with function or method parameters.

The one case where I've found it useful is in passing a subset of variables from one scope to another.

For example, if you have a controller assigning some variables to a template (pure PHP template in this case), your controller could internally keep them in a $template_vars array. When the template is rendered, use extract($template_vars) to get only those variables into the local scope. It makes for much easier to read and use template files.

Re: PHP bad practice: variable reuse

Robert Enyedi — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 07:02:15 GMT

In this case the same variable holds the end-result of the transformation having the same type. This is similar to output composition ($str = '<'.$str.'>'), a very reasonable operation in my opinion.