[dev] Thoughts on Horde 4

[Thomas Koch]

cc to eGroupWare-dev

Hi,

I'm Thomas Koch from Essen, Germany and a contributor to eGroupWare, but no 
official developer. I've already talked with Jan Schneider a bit about my 
dream, that eGroupWare and Horde could join forces to become THE GROUPWARE.

There have been some discussions in the eGroupWare-Developers list recently 
about eGroupWare2 and it seems, that we'll soon start a complete PHP5 
rewrite. I've already contacted a Typo3 developer, because they started their 
PHP5 rewrite already last year. So there are already 

eGroupWare, Horde, Typo3, ???, (streber-pm)

which will all implement

Adressbook, Calendar, eMail, DocumentManagement, Permission Management, ...

My thoughts about 
http://wiki.horde.org/BCBreakingHordeIssues

* Would you like to consider using ezcMail?
* "Filter all input through filter extension or library." - maybe ezcUserInput 
could help you?
* "Clean up Horde::loadConfiguration() mess." - ezcConfig?
* Templates: ezcTemplate....?

==autoload==

Autoload is great! You don't have to worry, that there's only one autoload 
function. If you need to combine different autoload algorithms, have a look 
at the autoload-helper of the Standard PHP Library:
http://de.php.net/manual/en/ref.spl.php
But eZ Components has such an inteligent autoload-framework, that I doubt 
you'll ever use something else once you've got infected. You don't need to 
follow any naming convention, because you register an array with the mapping 
from classname to file.
The biggest plus with autoload is, that you load only those classes, that you 
really need. No overhead of required, but not actual needed classes.
The second plus follows this one: As you're loading only those classes you 
really need and it's all done automatically, you're not afraid anymore to 
write tiny little classes instead of big monsters.

I've setup a personal proposal page for eGroupWare2 to have some examples to 
discuss about with the other eGroupWare developers:
http://www.egroupware2.de

Best regards,

Thomas Koch