Comments on: Some thoughts on extension development

By: Dmitry Dulepov

Dmitry Dulepov — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:20:02 +0000

>In TYPO3 v5 you have to learn new (but common) paradigms and patterns.
>This may take also quite a long time. But, in the end you are a geek in
>software development and not only in developing for a certain framework.

What if you know this stuff for nearly 10 years? :) It is not new, all those patterns existed in the beginning of this century. They are only taken to PHP programming lately. In Java and C++ they existed many years ago. Good that PHP developer also started using them :)

By: Jochen Rau

Jochen Rau — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:24:53 +0000

Hi Steffen. My post is not directly related to the development of TYPO3 v5. But, you’re right: The learning curve of TYPO3 v4 is steep. And, it will be steep in v5. But, there is a difference in how and what you have to learn. TYPO3 v4 has grown vastly over the last couple of years. Today, you have to spend hours and hours searching for the applicable API functions and work-arounds. So, it takes years to really feel comfortable with the system. In the end, you become a geek in programming for TYPO3 v4. In TYPO3 v5 you have to learn new (but common) paradigms and patterns. This may take also quite a long time. But, in the end you are a geek in software development and not only in developing for a certain framework.

By: Steffen Müller

Steffen Müller — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:02:44 +0000

The learning curve was steep for TYPO3 (v.3/4), although there was a lot of documentation. I hope it will be much easier to learn v.5/FLOW3, otherwise a lot of people could refuse to switch to v.5. We discussed this topic in the UG Freiburg this week and there were great concerns about loosing the connection to future development of TYPO3. I thought a while about that discussion and about motivating people to contribute. There are a lot of success factors and motivation killers, which sometimes are very close together. Example: Good documentation helps people to learn, but answering mailinglist requests with “RTFM” or “use google and find the docs” will not motivate them to use TYPO3 or even become an active member in the lists.
There were some other negative factors coming to my mind, like academic language without explanation, (seemingly) closed circles of developers, arrogant behavior, intransparency (e.g. of decision making), … Don’t get me wrong: I do not claim that this is the case for TYPO3 development, but things could be perceived to be like that. Normally, one does not have the time to follow the huge amount of communication channels (beat.typo3.org, multiple mailing lists, blogs, news, announcements, irc). Therefore it’s hard to follow what is going on. Maybe some more regular reports would be good here, channeling the communication, addressing the community. That could inspire people and make them believe in v.5.

By: Jochen Rau

Jochen Rau — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:23:19 +0000

Hi Steffen.
- To close the gap between the client’s language and the developer’s language is exactly what I addressed in this post. Let’s assume you have a client paying for the software you develop is really interested in using it to solve his problems (that’s not always the case; esp. for large companies). He will be able, and willing to describe the problem to be solved in his own business related words (the domain language). The client’s domain must then be translated by the developer into (domain) objects with applicable attributes and behavior. The client has to be guided to understand the constraints of todays software. And the developer has to get a deep insight into the client’s domain.
- TYPO3 should inspire a broad bandwidth of developers to share their ideas, code and knowledge. I fear loosing progressive and modern thinking developers to other open source projects. Every developer should know that his resources depend on lifelong learning. Therefore, it’s essential for the TYPO3 community to provide good tutorials, lessons, examples, and documentation.

By: Steffen Müller

Steffen Müller — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:33:41 +0000

P.P.S why use footnotes instead of direct links?

By: Steffen Müller

Steffen Müller — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:31:17 +0000

The evolution you have sketched here sounds convincing – but it misses some serious points:
- Customers often don’t know or can’t express exactly what they want – or they are not willing to spend time and effort to express themselves. One could apply this attitude to any person involved in a project. Ontology sounds like an approach to bring communication (and meaning) to one level, but I doubt it can handle oddness and couriosities of people adequately. See also: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_TsCq7ie4mYo/RhHy1lDsFsI/AAAAAAAAWZo/XWXGNYBUaOU/s1600/project.jpg
- The language of design patterns is complex and academic. Although patterns aim to make things less complex, easier to understand and better to control, reuse etc., a lot of people are not able to follow the new paradigms or just cannot afford the costs to do so. This might not a problem in enterprise projects, but in an open source community, you risk to loose the mainstream developers. Such losses hit OSS projects hard, because without the masses, spreading the word, testing and fixing small bugs is hard and expensive.

P.S. Welcome to the TYPO3 blogosphere :)

By: Michael Cannon

Michael Cannon — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:17:39 +0000

Great write up on a best practice process for TYPO3 extension development. Coming from the side of trying customize or maintain hundreds of extensions over the years, a consistent creation process will go a long ways to increasing code quality and maintainability.

Thanks Jochen!