Notes on using PHP namespaces¶

• Stay clear of class names that are PHP keywords. Example: "F3_Package_Controller_New" becomes "New" when adding namespaces, "F3_Blah_View_Empty" becomes "Empty", ... Rule: all reserved keywords are disallowed. But using "EmptyView" or "DefaultController" is cleaner style anyway!

• Watch out for that global namespace! Type hints like "Exception $e" will break - the current namespace is applied first, no fallback is applied for classs or interfaces! Use "\Exception $e" in cases like that. This includes instantiations of PHP internal classes as well, e.g. DateTime, ArrayObject, ... The same is true for any other non-namespaced classes you use in your code (look at the Lucene or PHPUnit parts of the code).

• Always use the fully qualified name (for now). I.e. even in a class always type the full name, as before, just with \ instead of _. This avoids problems with ambiguity, class loading, name resolution and changing the world climate until we have a better understanding of
  a) best practices on using namespaces
  b) how to refactor things if names are unique only if you know about the namespace of their scope

• Forget about tools telling you about broken code (like Zend Studio or PDT) until they know about namespaces.

• PHPUnit is now no longer an svn:externals resource but a patched version in our own SVN. Patches will be submitted to Sebastian Bergmann and eventually we can go back to using PHPUnit like before.

• DEV3 now complains about syntax errors in TypoScript2 files as it does not yet know about the new syntax for component names.

• no code documentation tool currently handles namespaces, the Buxa Code Documentor is a project having this in mind, the major players will likely follow.