Joseph Piché, Web development professional with expertise in PHP, MySQL query optimization, Ajax, and XHTML.

Any programming environment with more than one person working on the same project requires communication; it is an essential part of getting a job done efficiently, and it is common sense. But while normal business communication includes writing, speaking and body language, programming communication also includes readability of code along with good documentation.

Having experience with coding in a large project with other people, I clearly see that indentation is a large part of readability of code. It is extremely important to be consistent with spacing regardless of the language. However, whether to use tabs or spaces for indentation is up for debate. In fact, the issue of tabs versus spaces is a highly debated issue; a simple search will show that. Even so, it is important to have a clearly defined rule when engaging in a project with other people.

To show the importance of this many different open source projects define strict guidelines for indentation. To list a few:

• Style Guide for Python Code
• Python Style Guide for C Code
• Zend Framework Coding Standard for PHP
• WordPress Coding Standards
• WebKit Coding Style Guidelines
• Flex SDK coding conventions and best practices

Most of these say 4 spaces for per indentation level, and all say to never mix tabs and spaces. I do 4 spaces; my programming team at work has agreed on 4 spaces—it works really well in pretty much all cases. All good editors have ways to make this easy to do using the tab key too.

More than likely the language you code in already has some guide already. Please follow it, and remember what the Zen of Python states: “Readability counts.”

PHP class methods and variables can be declared as static similarly to how Java static methods and variables work. As often as possible I try to stay away from anything static in PHP, since it can lead to confusion, bad program design, and in some cases memory management problems. But sometimes it actually does make sense and more often than not just getting things done is more important than doing things correctly.

However, PHP 5.3 introduced a lot of cool new features like namespaces and something called “Late Static Bindings” via a new keyword. But what is Late Static Binding and how does it differ from how PHP before 5.3 works? The reason the new static keyword was added is to allow for intuitive static references involving inheritance.

Before 5.3, PHP used early static binding: the process of resolving any static references to the class where it was initially declared. Clear as mud right? This is best shown by the code example from the PHP documentation.

<?php
class A {
    public static function who() {
        echo __CLASS__;
    }
    public static function test() {
        self::who();
    }
}

class B extends A {
    public static function who() {
        echo __CLASS__;
    }
}

B::test();
?>

The above code will output A not the (maybe) expected B. Replacing self with static in the example will output B, but only in 5.3 and above.

Since none of the servers I work with have 5.3, and some are even lacking 5.2, I cannot take use of the static keyword in my code. But even so, I feel like I understand PHP better now that new feature is available since this clearly shows that using self in any version will use “Early Static Binding.”