A few posts are floating around the net from Ben Ramsey and Christopher Kunz about fla…(nahh!, change that term!), erm…unfinished aspects? potential issues? something?, in both the ext/filter extension and the Zend Framework’s Zend_Filter_Input. This small flurry of potential feedback resulted in a scorching post from Pierre asking PHP users and developers who have not done their homework to "be humble and keep quiet".

Personally I haven’t tested ext/filter. I should no doubt be shot like a rabid dog for daring to post about this for that reason alone. Commenting idly without any knowledge of an extension is obviously illegal somewhere, possibly China. Honestly, the inflamatory post was a bit much. Where’s the feedback going to come from if the first few guys to blog in a large public forum about possible issues are shot down so abruptly? Sure, it’s past the release date but, hey, that’s when the average developer will start worrying about these things. It’s the point at which the developer community at large will finally start evaluating this new addition to see how it works.

It is a bit worrying to see publicity like this so soon, and with such a public negative response following like a mighty slap from Ye Gods above. I know of only two people who have actually used ext/filter so far (both think it’s great). That’s what happens until it arrives enabled by default (?) in a major PHP release and developers suddenly realise it’s here to stay. It’ll be interesting to see what issues are raised – but it could be weeks before enough developers are using it to catch anything potentially missed (no offence! don’t shoot!) by the filter developers.

Well, the whole back and forth exchange was entertaining if nothing else. Ben notes in his blog he has issues to put together and communicate to the ext/filter team so I’ll be interesting in seeing where these lead. I rate this one as a Teacup Storm until something turns up on the internals list or an issue tracker where the developers on the ground can maul them to their hearts content.

On the Zend_Filter mention, well, 0.20 is a preview release. Issues like locale specific implementations of common filters was always going to be a long wait – I doubt the Irish telephone format is essential anyway ;-). 0.15 didn’t even have an RFC complient email regex at the time. In fact neither does 0.20 yet! Getting one together requires a reference implementation which obviously raises potential copyright and license questions about the source. Hopefully they’ll rope someone with an implementation into signing a CLA soon.

Disclaimer: The above commentary is stuffed with personal comments. Live with it. Pretty please with sugar on top?

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