Among the interesting features of Phing is its extensibility, and of the hallmarks of that exensibility is the ability to define new Task types as PHP classes, which are by default located in the default namespace only. Can we do better ?
At the simplest, Task classes are created by embedding ad-hoc tasks like:
Some of the features in PHP may be surprising. Think for instance of the way PDO is able to create classed results, place the query results into them, and only then invoke the constructor when using PDO::FETCH_CLASS fetch mode without the additional PDO::FETCH_PROPS_LATE. Every wished you could do this in userland code ? Turns out this has long been possible, and is even simpler since PHP 5.4.
I was checking a bunch of Behat features left by former developers on a project, and noticed that the Rake rule to run them looked like:
$ behat -c config/behat.yml features
But this looked suspiciously like defaut options. How about running them more simply like just $ behat ? Alas, this would throw something like: