I usually don’t extol the virtues of magazines in blog posts. However, I’ve been sitting down with a printout of May’s php|architect Magazine and figured it was well worth some attention. A lot of PHP developers whether newcomers or even old hands just looking to expand their knowledge would love this issue.

The two that stick in my mind are Jim Delahunt’s “Unicode and PHP: A Gentle Introduction” and Jeff Moore’s “Test Pattern: Model View Controller”. Both are something those seeking illumination on these topics should certainly read. Jeff’s article presents an overview of the MVC Pattern and injects a lot of clarity into a confusing subject for many PHP developers. This is one of the few times reading about MVC in PHP that there’s more than a vague reference to a really important point – that Views may (even should) be empowered to read data from the Model. As Jeff notes the continuing popular trend of forcing an application to shuffle between Controllers just to inject Model data in part of a View is completely unnecessary. In my own humble opinion, over-dependency on Controllers to inject Model data into Views is wasteful of resources by pushing folk into adding more and more Controller classes for every teeny View->Model interaction (more work and files to maintain). I’d be hard pressed to believe it doesn’t impose a performance cost too.

Jim Delahunt’s article is another noteworthy one. I have a pet peeve about developers and popular online websites which store usernames with Unicode characters, render HTML which declares itself UTF-8, and which results in garbage characters like question marks everywhere. For a long time, my own name with a common European character (a-acute) failed to render on most sites claiming to output UTF-8 – assuming of course the site even allowed me to submit my real name… These days there’s a marked improvement. This excellent article digs into Unicode in an easy to access way. If you are still not familiar with Unicode, UTF-8, the other Unicode standards, and why they are essential knowledge when building internationalised web apps then this is the article for you.

What else is in the mag this month? There’s a cool overview of the Symfony Framework, Ilia Alshanetsky on Dictionary Attacks, and a few other articles I really enjoyed but won’t mention here directly. As PHP magazines go, this is an action packed issue worth being enthusiastic about. You can review and buy the PDF version of May’s issue for a handful of Canadian Dollars over at php|architect.