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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP
By :
In its simplest definition, a legacy application is any application that you, as a developer, inherit from someone else. It was written before you arrived, and you had little or no decision-making authority in how it was built.
However, there is a lot more weight to the word legacy among developers. It carries with it connotations of poorly organized, difficult to maintain and improve, hard to understand, untested or untestable, and a series of similar negatives. The application works as a product in that it provides revenue, but as a program, it is brittle and sensitive to change.
Because this is a book specifically about PHP-based legacy applications, I am going to offer some PHP-specific characteristics that I have seen in the field. For our purposes, a legacy application in PHP is one that matches two or more of the following descriptions:
die() or exit() if a certain value is not set.These characteristics are probably familiar to anyone who has had to deal with a very old PHP application. They describe what I call a typical PHP application.