[TYPO3-ect] My first impression of lib/div

[Bastian Waidelich]

If I might add my two cents and the reason why I'm against "branchomania" *g

Although in FLOW3 details of the implementation will differ greatly, 
it's never early enough to get used to the MVC-paradigm and to get a 
feeling for the right amount of separation.
People will definitely be more comfortable with TYPO3 5.0 if they start 
working with lib/div.

Even though we're bound to restrictions of the current architecture and 
even though the framework is not perfect (which framework is?), I think 
that at the moment lib/div is the best possibility we have to build 
extensions on top of TYPO3.

I've written about 20 lib/div-based extensions yet and I've tried to 
keep them all up to date.
My impression: Due to the clarity and separation of MVC it's a matter of 
minutes rather then hours to update extensions to the latest version of 
lib/div. Even larger extensions never use the whole feature-set of the 
libraries So it's mostly just a few search-'n-replace-sessions in the 
controller classes - assumed that you've followed the best practices and 
assumed that you know what have been changed. With the latter I had the 
most trouble: I had to "manually" compare different lib-versions to find 
out that e.g. the render-method now actually returns the content instead 
of storing it in a property and things like that.

My opinion is:
If we find a way to properly document API-changes, if we are aware of 
backwards compatibility (in the way that we surrender over-ambitious 
changes like "templatePath" -> "pathToTemplateDirectory") and if 
developers specify exact dependencies like "'lib' => '0.1.0-0.1.0'" we 
can go without the "multi versioning". Cause this feels just wrong and 
probably leads to even more confusion and complexity - not to mention 
the code duplication and that we'd have to bugfix several branches in 
parallel.
Obviously, if a developer can't (or refuses to) keep his popular 
lib/div-based extension up to date, we have a problem - the same problem 
we have with all extensions. But with the flexibility of the 
lib/div-framework you get around this much easier.

I like Franz' idea to start a little survey. That way you get the 
opinion of maillist-inactive developers. I'd happily help out with some 
questions.

Looking forward to some nice lib/div-addons!
Basti