Gregory Szorc's Blog: PHP Now Using Proper HTTP Status Codes on Error
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Gregory Szorc writes today about a fact that's only recently come true in PHP's handling of errors - it seems that it now returns proper HTTP status codes when a problem comes up.   If it encounters a serious error, like a parse error, it just stops and there is nothing you can do about it. If this happens on a hosted web site, you get a blank page served with the HTTP status code of 200. Completely useless to remote connections.   This fix will be included in the next version of PHP - the upcoming 5.2.4 release.
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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John Mertic points out two new things today, one related to the PHP installer and the other to the snaps website.   No major user-visible changes were made for this release [to the PHP installer], but all the problems people had with configuring IIS and Apache should have gone away with this release. I've made some changes to the builder so that it supports an installer for PHP 6, which should appear on snaps.php.net soon.   The announcement about the snaps website is the facelift it's gotten to make things more like the main PHP site and a bit easier to navigate to find the snapshot you want.
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Stefan Esser is trying to clear up some confusion in a new post to the PHP Security Blog today about his stand on enabling open_basedir on your PHP installation.   From time to time I get the question why I recommend enabling open_basedir and on the other hand call it a solution flawed by design. This is actually a good question, because the untrained PHP user might get a little bit confused about this and might believe that I change my opinion on a daily basis.   He talks about his reasoning - how it does it's job protecting PHP developers from being able to get to those file, but how it's also flawed with issues due to some 3rd party libraries that have their own problems.
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Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".   I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.   He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).   He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.
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In a new posting from Harry on Dynamically Typed today, he talks about PHP showing the first signs of a COM for PHP.
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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On his blog, Stuart Herbert has a quick tip showing how to mimic a feature of Ruby on Rails:   I'm still working on the next article in my series looking at PHP on servers, so in the mean time, check out this simple way to emulate Ruby's nice way of handling separate getter, setter and state query methods in PHP.   He admits his example isn't as elegant as the Ruby method, but it does get the job done. Code for the method is included in his post ready for cut and pasting.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPClasses.org: A PHP killer feature - Streams abstractionRob Thompson's Blog: Switch vs. IfPHPEverywhere: Octopussy numbers in PHPJob Posting: MODE Visual Seeks PHP Developer (Charlotte, NC)ProDevTips.com: Why PHP as a templating language sucksMatthew Turland's Blog: The Yin and Yang of TypingStubbles Blog: Stubbles 0.5.0 releasedChristopher Jones' Blog: Updated connection pooling in PHP's OCI8 extensionBen Ramsey's Blog: Congrats Costa Rica PHP!Carsten Lucke's Blog: Configuration issues with Xdebug on Debian Etch
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As per this announcement on the PHP-Coding-Practices.com site today, they've launched a new PHP Links Directory as an offshoot of their site.   It's finally there! PHP-Coding-Practices.com's own PHP Link Directory, which saw its first light today at 12am GMT as a cause of a poll we had two weeks ago. It will feature only the best of the best links to all good php resources. My plans are to form an excellent collection of links for all topics that are important for us: frameworks, team programming, language-specific stuff, development tools, performance & optimization, refactoring, etc.   The directory is broken up into several categories including "Agile Software Development", "PHP Community Sites" and "Refactoring". Currently, there's only one category that has a link in it - CakePHP for Felix Geisendorfer's blog ThinkingPHP and Beyond.
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Aaron Wormus has a new note on his blog today about his presentation at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and another speaker he's excited to hear.    One of the Zend conference sessions that I'm pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe's (of WSO2) "Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP".   I'll be presenting a session on "Moving to PHP5 with Style." This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.    Aaron's talk fits under the banner of the "PHP Development" talks, including others on topics like hosting PHP applications on Windows, working with PDO, unicoding in PHP6, and using PHPUnit.
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Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!   We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?   He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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Builder.com.au has a new article today about the recent image issue - the PHP code embedded inside the GIF - that's come up on several sites.   The exploit code slipped through the site's defenses with the aid of a legitimate image at the beginning of the file, according to a blog post on the Sans Institutes's Internet Storm Center. [...] Malicious attackers planted PHP coded exploit script within an image file. PHP is often used as a programming language to create dynamic Web sites.   The article reports that, while this exploit hasn't happened much, the occurrences of it's use are growing with victims in a wide range of classifications - from small personal sites out to a certain major image hosting site. This same issue was discussed here on the PHPClasses.org website as well.
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In a new post today, Clay Loveless talks about some issues he's been having with PHP and JSON, specifically with the JSON encoding method in PHP 5.2.1.   As of PHP 5.2.1, json_decode() no longer follows the published standards for JSON-encoded texts. Why not? For no reason other than the convenience of those ignorant of JSON standards.   His complaint stems from the results of a vat_dump statement - prior to this version it would give a NULL, but now it returns a "bool(true)" value back, resulting in some breakage of previous scripts. He spends the rest of the post explaining his voyage through the JSON world and how things are supposed to behave. He also digs a little deeper into the var_dump issue and why he thinks it's such a bad thing.
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Chris Chabot has posted a PHP package he's worked up that functions as a daemon sitting and listening on a socket.   To deal with 1000's of concurrent, always on (comet aka hanging iframe) http (server) connections, and an equal amount of IRC client connections, plus being able to interpret and parse and delegate all the messages and events, i needed a very fast, stable, flexible and easy to use 'daemon' library for PHP.   He links to the tarball of the release and to the project page as well as including an example of its usage - creating a simple HTTP server with various hooks built in (like on_connect, on_read, and on_timer).