Posts Tagged ‘PHP’

Here’s an interesting sales pitch. Using a PHP Framework? Cool. Just make sure you add Zend.

The Zend Framework is a fairly standard, (optionally) MVC PHP application framework. It comes with all the usual functionality; request routing, database access, templates (through view files) etc. It also comes with a lot of extra functionality that you might find useful in your application, including some of the best web services libraries available, especially when working with Google’s APIs.

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In my post on professional development for PHPers, I discussed the value of attending conferences. Well, php|tek in Chicago is coming up, and you should be there! The php|architect team has reported more than 40% of seats have been reserved already, so get in quickly.

If Chicago isn’t an option for you, try PHP Quebec, php london or the DC PHP Conference.

Paul Reinheimer, a senior trainer for php|architect, is running another PHP contest. And you should enter.

Given an arbitrary (but valid) HTML file, retrieve all the links that would be displayed as hyper links and display them sequentially, having removed any duplicates. You may use any built in function, the phpinfo() of the server used for testing will be attached. You just need to retrieve the links, you don’t need to worry about them being relative or absolute.

Very straightforward, no? The trick is doing it well, and Paul intends to thoroughly test your entry.

So, why should you enter? First, it gives you a chance to test your PHP skills in a new environment - experimentation. You not only have to build the script, you have to build it well, and quality isn’t always a criteria in your day-to-day development. You might also learn something new, especially if you don’t often work with the string functions or regular expressions.

Head over to his post on the c7y boards and give it a go.

By the way, you might find this tutorial on link scraping useful.

Google Trends graph for “Delphi for PHP”:

Is it time to start preparing our Delphi for PHP eulogy? (more…)

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an impending death of templating engines on our hands.

I won’t go as far as to speculate we’re beyond the death of templating engines, but the facts of the matter are this:

1. Templating engines seperate presentation from logic.
2. Today’s frameworks seperate presentation from logic.
3. Any good developer not using a framework either seperates presentation from logic anyway, or has a good reason for not doing so.

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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…)

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.

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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…)

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…)

So, you’re an experienced PHP developer and you’re looking for your next gig. There are a lot of job boards out there, especially for freelancers, but it’s hard to value your skills and level of expertise in many of them. Here are some suggestions for finding your next job as a PHP developer.
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