I have recently been looking at the use of ‘Strict Standards’ and the impact upon any Macrotone written extensions. One thing that has struck me is the use of the ampersand when making calls to JFactory (and other similar functions).
A lot of the examples on the Joomla documentation site show the call with the ampersand present, but it then generates a warning message if ‘Strict Standards’ reporting is turned on.
i.e. Is it:
1. uinfo = JFactory::getUser($user_id);
or
2. uinfo = & JFactory::getUser($user_id);
My understanding is that the ampersand after the equals sign is not required. It was necessary to let PHP4 know that we wanted to assign a reference of the object to the variable instead of a copy. In PHP4 if the ampersand was not supplied it created another copy of the requested user information. The default behaviour in PHP 5 is to assign by reference and using the ampersand produces a notice. Joomla! 2.5 only runs on PHP 5, so the ampersand is not only redundant, it also throws a strict notice. I suspect that in PHP5 that if any extra instances are created by the use of the ampersand that they will be closed by the garbage cleaning when the containing function or class is closed, so apart from the Strict Standards warning message it is not really a problem at all.