On Wed, September 27, 2006 4:25 am, Pinocchio007 wrote: > is simple: which project/framework to choose in order to bring the > current > "best practice" to our students, and prepare them for the future. Not > being > a professional PHP developer myself, I would appreciate any > recommendation. > Which OS project would you include? Which framework? And why? Here is what I would suggest: Instead of flooding a single project with 20 potentially uninterested students, give the students a handful of projects to choose from, or even a large list, or even just let them pick *any* existing PHP project from sourceforge or any other semi-reputable source. The productivity of an Open Source developer, even a student trying to get a grade, is a whole lot higher when they picked a project that interested them in the first place, instead of just being assigned to it. They may not get "best practices" -- But they'll sure get "real-world" :-) But perhaps they could even end up being the one to bring "best practices" *TO* the project. Which will teach them more? Watching a project already doing "best practices" or pushing a project to the next level by implementing your instruction to bring "best practices" to the table? One other suggestion: For the advanced class, suggest that they could also work on the PHP source itself, rather than a PHP application. Or, perhaps, by that point, they'd be more interested in working on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ming, or any of a couple hundred extensions in PECL. At this point, they'd be actually writing C code, but so what? :-) They'll learn a heck of a lot more about how PHP really works that way, that's for sure. PS If you don't know the history of PHP, you should ask Ze'ev and Andi (aka Zend) how they got involved in PHP. It is incredibly relevant to this question/answer provided above, and well worth your time. If you're lucky, maybe YOUR students can get sucked into a wildly successful OSS project, and end up with an honorary degree because they were too busy "doing" instead of studying. :-) -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
