More code cleaned up, test coverage increased

[curry684]

More generic finetuning and best practices, added some more phpDoc and some tests to increase line coverage to 85%. Made some private functionality that could limit extension protected.

[weaverryan]

I actually disagree with this: we should only add extension points when people ask and give us a good reason - that'll help maintenance in the future. If we keep this private, the can still fetch the Request if they want to, but injecting the request_stack service into directly into some base class.

[curry684]

I don't agree with your comments on protected variables and functions from a software architect's point of view. In a properly set up OOP library actually nearly everything should be protected instead of private, because you the developer can never foresee what other people ever want to do with your library.

Take the $container change as a practical use case: exactly why would you want to keep it private? Does the class' other functionality inherently break if a derived class accesses the container? Or even if he overwrites it? In my opinion it doesn't, see there is no reason to forbid reading and writing it. Private visibility should be reserved for properties that will fatally break if 'abused', like the primary key of a Doctrine entity. In nearly all other cases you're only making decisions for others that they can make fine themselves.

Just my 5 cents, we can agree to disagree and I'll revert those changes.

[weaverryan]

@curry684 In Symfony's core, we take the exact opposite stance :). But, it's definitely subjective.

Here's an old blog post about that decision: http://fabien.potencier.org/pragmatism-over-theory-protected-vs-private.html. In short, private makes it much easier for us to make changes, without breaking end-user code. But if there's a use-case for protected, and we decide it's the right extension point to add, we should do that.

Cheers!

[curry684]

Yeah I know the post, I just tend to be on the pragmatist end of things 😉

I'll revert the protected changes tonight, code is on my laptop at home.

[curry684]

Done 👍

[weaverryan]

Awesome, thank you!