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Hi,

I'm sorry I've to write this message, but you set me in trouble. I wanted to use this weekend to learn about YUI3 and the PHP Loader to prepare an introduction for our company. I'm a big fan of YUI and have learned a lot about Frontend Engeneering from you folks at YAHOO. Therefore it made me really sad when I looked at the mess that is the PHP loader.
I want to convince my collegues, that YUI is a great library. That we should maybe use it more instead of Prototype and jQuery, because it's cleaner and more elegant. But when they get to see the PHP loader, they will laugh at me and all this YUI mess.
I believe, that YUI is of much better quality then the PHP loader and that you'd do all of us a great favor to abandon the current incarnation of it. It's better not to have anything but this.

So the list of issues:

There's absolutely no reason in 2009 to publish any code with PHP4
support.

The use of the $GLOBALS variable when defining the libraries metadata,
as well as defining global functions in combo.functions.inc.php is
shocking!

The nesting of if and foreach structures in combo.php goes down six
levels. This is much more then I'd accept in our own inhouse code.

It's not on your side to end my application with die() statements in
loader.php! I wanna decide myself, when and how my application ends.

You left debug statements and even old code in code comments:
e.g. loader.php:380

There is an empty method in loader.php:389

There are methods without docblocks.

This is argueable, but I think that a methodname should always
contain a verb.

Methods should not be too long for different reasons. One could argue
what too long means, but I think getAllDependencies from loader.php is
way too long.

Wow! The method sortDependencies is such a mess it leaves me speachless.

I believe PHPLoader is opensource and anyone can contribute to improve it, that's the whole Idea behind open source.

also this is absolutely incorrect . method name should be as descriptive as it can get,

Hi ,

I did not meant to sound rude, just my understanding on "opensource"-ness is following:

PHPLoader is excellent source that YUI gave to community for us to elaborate on it further, to extend it, port it , and make it better, nothing is perfect, even PHP language itself, common, its 2009 and php still does not support unicode natively ,Java supported it from version 0.0.01
but those shortcomings should give community motivation to improve it.

regarding methods, sorry I misread it, yes usually methods should not be too long, but than again it is PHP after all , not Java, or other "real" programming language

Thanks for clearing that up. If the loader is beta then we can work to clean this up. However I did not find the string "beta" on http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/phploader . I think it could help to mention the beta status there.

Best regards, Thomas