Here’s one for all the Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python (+Django) and ASP/.net web developers. There are a lot of myths about PHP, often developing from the language’s early beginnings, or simply by misconceptions perpetuated by areas of the enormous user base.
Sure, it isn’t perfect. It has its problems; from professionalism to consistency and even versioning. Still, it’s a fantastic language for web development; it’s efficient, scalable and, when used appropriately, effective. Read on for five reasons you should be using PHP for web development. (more…)
Akash Mehta in PHP | No Comments »
Some of you may be familiar with Paul Reinheimer’s funcaday.com. Every day, the site lists a new PHP function, including the function prototype, description, uses and further notes. On Valentine’s Day this year, they chose a rather amusing parody function. Read on to have some fun with PHP and GD.
(more…)
Often, an inexperienced PHP developer will hop onto IRC and ask a question in ##php on Freenode. And if the question is trivial, the answer seems obvious or they simply seem like a newbie, they may soon find themselves bombarded with such comments as “RTFM”, “Go learn PHP”, “We are not your personal tutors” or simply “You need to become a better PHP developer”. So, how is it that one becomes a better PHP developer? In this post, I’ll outline five ways to be a better developer, improve your productivity, write less code and achieve more with your web applications. (more…)
Akash Mehta in PHP, Web | 3 Comments »
When it comes to PHP security, you often think of input filtering, SQL injection prevention, XSS in user submitted content and so on. Well, forget about that. They’re all pretty trivial compared to what I feel is by far the most important security issue of any web application. Read on to find out why. (more…)
Akash Mehta in PHP, Web | No Comments »
Getting a job is pretty straightforward. Getting a PHP job is about as unconventional as it gets. Here’s what you can do to secure a better job with your existing PHP skills. (more…)
Akash Mehta in PHP | 1 Comment »
PEAR is always full of interesting and useful PHP packages. They may not be terribly efficient, but the power they offer easily outweighs that. As of today, we have a stable version of the very interesting Text_Diff package.
Ever seen Wikipedia’s revision diff system, that allows you to compare two versions of a page and clearly marks the differences? Well, if you’ve ever wanted to do that yourself, now you can. The PEAR package Text_Diff has just released a stable version, and offers all the text comparison functionality you need to add some pretty cool revision management features to your application. It even comes with a MediaWiki-style demo. If you’ve been looking for a version of the levenshtein() function that supports more than 255 characters, this could be your chance.
So, you’re an up-and-coming PHP developer, you’re spending a lot of time learning new tricks and you’re always on the bleeding edge when it comes to using technologies in your web applications. What’s next? Here are some of the options available for professional development. (more…)
Akash Mehta in PHP | 2 Comments »
So, you’re about to build an entire web application in PHP. You’ve worked out how you’re going to do it, you’ve got a general idea what it’ll look like, maybe you’ve even chosen a framework (if you don’t have any to choose from, find some). Before you go any further, take a step back and run through this checklist.
There’s always a bridge between textbook knowledge of programming - syntax, procedure etc. - and the real world knowledge that you get from actually developing real applications. Here are five things every PHP developer should be familiar with before they begin developing web applications in PHP.
1. Frameworks Frameworks are arguably one of the most important areas of PHP development. With no single accepted way of developing web applications in PHP, a number of open source frameworks are available, helping you code quicker, more consistently and more effectively. Some of the best include CakePHP, Symfony and CodeIgniter. A lot of the frameworks also follow the MVC design pattern, which you should definitely be familiar with should you ever have to work on code that follows it. After a while, you may even feel inclined to create your own framework to meet your needs.
2. Templating engines If you’re not using a framework that enforces a specific design pattern, chances are you want to be using a templating engine. Whether you create your own or using one of the existing options (like Smarty), a templating engine allows you to entirely seperate your code logic from your HTML interface code (and associated CSS/JS/etc.). This considerably simplifies your code, allows quick and easy modifications to the actual front-end of your application, and makes it easier for non-developers to modify your application’s visuals.
