SitePoint PHP Blog: Good and Bad PHP Code
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On the SitePoint PHP blog today, Kevin Yank shares his thoughts in the form of a list for what makes for "good" and "bad" PHP code.   When interviewing a PHP developer candidate for a job at SitePoint, there is one question that I almost always ask, because their answer tells me so much about the kind of programmer they are. Here's the question: "In your mind, what are the differences between good PHP code and bad PHP code?"   Among the items on the list for the good side are things like: structure, consistency, security, and portability. He gives a bit of example code that shows the three levels of "goodness" in a script (using $_GET variables).
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Reinhold Weber's Blog: 40 signs you really are a lousy PHP programmerScott Klarr's Blog: PHP Cheat SheetsDeveloperTutorials.com: Building Desktop Applications in PHPPadraic Brady's Blog: The Zend Framework and Microformats: Zend_Microformat ProposedCommunity News: GoPHP5 Project Wraps UpJob Posting: Technology Resources, Inc Seeks Senior PHP Developer (New York, NY)Job Posting: Red Ventures Seeks Sr. Systems Analyst/Web Developer (Charlotte, NC)Community News: Forage - A Search Abstraction LayerCommunity News: php|architect Launches C7Y Site (News/Podcast/Forums)Richard Heyes' Blog: SMTP for PHP 5
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Dave Dash's Blog: nginx and symfonyZend Developer Zone: The ZendCon Sessions Episode 6: Project Management Methods to Maintain IT StandSitePoint PHP Blog: Tokenization using regular expression sub patternsIT Jobs Watch: Results for PHP Developers in LondonJob Posting: Digital River Seeks PHP Developer (Eden Prairie, MN)Dan Scott's Blog: Oooh...looks like I've got (even more) work cut out for meLeon Chevalier's Blog: Improve website load time by 500% with 3 lines of codePHPWomen.org: elePHPantsPhil Thompson's Blog: 7 PHP functions that saved my lifeStuart Herbert's Blog: Using suphp To Secure A Shared Server
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest poll conducted over this past week asking which, of their given options, is the best helpful hint for creating a web application in PHP.   Two of the options ranked higher than the rest with one (Page/object caching) coming out on top of the other (Don't save performance testing for the end of the project). The remainder of the votes were divided pretty evenly between the last three options: "Use multi result set queries to your database", "gzip compression", and "Tune your web server".   While you're in the polling mood, you should check out this week's new poll that wonders which of their options might be the biggest hindrance to PHP5's adoption in the community.
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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In this new article from DevShed.com, they provide a high-level introduction to PHP - what it is, where it came from, some of the sample features (of both PHP 4 and PHP 5), as well as some of the drawbacks for the language.
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Josh Sharp has posted a new article to his blog advocating something that there's still a lot of controversy around in the PHP community - frameworks (when to use them and when to not).   PHP's ease of use is also its downfall. Because there are less restrictions on the structure of the code you write, it's much easier to write bad code. But there is a solution: use a framework. [...] Of course, if you're not taken with any of the packages above you can also write your own framework, which I've done and will talk about in the next few posts. But for now, let's have a look at the common benefits of a framework.   He's broken it out to talk about the usual framework structure, MVC and how a framework can enforce good code standards. He also mentions some happy side benefits of their use including making for "pretty URLs" and the helpers that most of the frameworks come with.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:PHP-GTK Community Site: Add icons to GtkMenuphp|architect: php|tek 2007 schedule now onlineRyan Malesevich's Blog: Comments Closed After 21 DaysCodeSnipers.com: Book review: Beginning Ajax with PHP by Lee BabinCommunity News: TorrentVolve (PHP-driven Web-based BitTorrent)Stefan Mischook's Blog: Book Review: PHP 5 in PracticeJSLabs Blog:  How to create a php upload progress meterAlexander Netkachev's Blog: PHP IDE with debugger 0.1.6 is outDeveloper.com: Forms Validation with Symfony and PrototypeMarco Tabini's Blog: 5 PHP Performance Tips You Probably Don't Want To HearThe Codist Blog: I Will Never Understand the Appeal Of PHPArnold's Blog: Without a framework: (M)VCPHPBuilder.com: Reading RSS feeds in PHP: Part 1Mike Potter's Blog: AMFPHP 1.9 Examples from Renaun EricksonPHP 10.0 Blog: php -T (variable tainting)
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Luke Welling takes a humorous look at something he misses in PHP - register globals being set to on.    I am aware that there are some things so shocking that you are not supposed to say them in polite company [...] so confronting that they are best kept to yourself regardless of how strongly you believe them. I have a similarly shocking sentiment that I feel I have to share.   I really like register_globals in PHP.    He reminicies about the days gone by of being able to assume that register_globals is turned on, the days of simpler, lighter code that's even easier for the newbies to get into. Anyone for a tshirt?
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Job Posting: WorldNetJobs.com Seeks Expert PHP Developer (Multiple Locations - FL/MD/NY)Stefan Reuter's Blog: Profiling PHP ApplicationsRich Zygler's Blog: People work with WS-* web services in PHP? Why?PHPBuilder.com: Securing Data Sent Via GET RequestsKore Nordmann's Blog: Comparision of PHP image librariesJim Wynia's Blog:  WebDAV, PHP and YouPadraic Brady's Blog: Namespaces (or Yet Another Pointless Opinion Piece)Christopher Jones' Blog: PHP 5.2.5 RPMs with OCI8 and PDO_OCI are availableZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 29: PHP Women Podcast (Recorded Live)Evert Pot's Blog: PHP WebDAV Integration Library
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:DeveloperTutorials.com: AJAX and PHP Form ProcessingPHPRiot.com: Monitoring File Uploads using Ajax and PHPCommunity News: Has Smarty's Time Come?Deasil.com: Lessons to be learned from PHPIan Bicking's Blog: What PHP Deployment Gets RightDaniel Crook's Blog: Mashups from IBM at NYPHP in JanuaryMike Naberezny's Blog:  Horde/Yaml 1.0 ReleasedMikko Koppanen's Blog: Padding thumbnail with colorRichard Lord's Blog: If you want to create AVM2 swfs from PHPZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Episode 31: Book Review - Sitepoint's PHP Anthology, 2nd Ed.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:ProDevTips.com: Writing a CMS/Community with Smarty and the Zend Framework: Part 6Nessa's Blog: Using an .htaccess with PHP Compiled as CGIArnold Daniels' Blog: How I PHP: The Output Handler - ContinuedMartynas Jusevicius' Blog: PHP 5 features: Class autoloadingSean Coates' Blog: Actually Solving a Problem (believe it or not)The Northclick Blog: Message Queue Project: First working versionStefan Mischook's Blog: A Question about object properties in PHP ClassesJob Posting: G2 Technology Seeks PHP Developer (Memphis, TN)Rob Allen's Blog: Zend_View: Access the view from a view helperDavid Walsh's Blog: Using PHP Generic Objects To Organize Your Code
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Krystian Hoffman has posted to his blog today a few reasons (10 to be exact) that he likes and uses PHP. Fortunately, most of them are some of the best reasons for anyone to use the language.   ended up with ten points on why I use PHP and I guess this would be a good post here on my blog, as it seems people like lists in general and maybe I could get some people out there that aren't really sure about whether PHP is good or bad, to get some insight at least.  Here's some of his list:   The PHP Community The (language's) Performance Its Portability It has strong Object-oriented support   Other things got a mention as well - the low learning curve, low cost, included libraries - but the above few seemed the strongest.
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In a new post to his blog, Chris Hartjes, spurred on by an article in the latest edition of php|architect magazine (covering protecting your code), has shared a few opinions starting with a certain paragraph near the end.   To start, I will focus on the paragraph above. What I get out of that is that if only your source was closed and hidden from prying eyes, it would not have bugs in it. Which is, of course, total nonsense. Code has bugs because it's open and they feel safer? There are two kinds of bugs: application bugs (which is the code I would write) and system bugs (in this case, bugs that that appear from PHP itself). I'm sorry, but there is nothing I can do if there is a bug in PHP that causes my application to crash except to point this bug out to the people who have the ability to fix it.   He goes on to talk more about how protection like this (the article talks about using the IonCube Encoder) will not stop someone if they're really determine to get at the code underneath the encryption. His only suggestion is to make an application good enough that people wouldn't want to try to steal it as much and would rather pay for their version.   Encode your stuff if you want, but be aware that the minute you choose to do that you are telling your customers "I don't trust you" and I have a hard time understanding a business model that assumes people are going to want to steal the stuff you sell.
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The ProDevTips.com site has a little something to say about PHP as a templating language - "it sucks":   I frequently read articles about why any template system made with PHP is per definition redundant because PHP is itself such a good templating engine. This is my take on this whole rant-genre.   He points out an article from the "why it doesn't suck" sort of from Brian Lozier that he thinks "misses the heart of the issue". He suggests the opposite, however - that PHP as a templating language (templating software written in PHP sitting on top of a PHP application) is a really bad idea. It only adds overhead that most developers, unless they're experienced with the technology enough to know how to use it, will only work around (like the {php}{/php} tags in Smarty).
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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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In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:    I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.   We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.    Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.