Andrei Zmievski's Blog: PHP 6 and Request Decoding
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Andrei Zmievski has posted something new to his blog today about a feature of PHP6 that's finally been hammered down - HTTP input (request) decoding.   There have been no fewer than 4 different proposals floated before, but this one combines flexibility, performance, intuitiveness, and minimal architectural changes, and has only a couple of small drawbacks. Let's take a closer look.   He details the functionality - what it is, what's been decided on, and the advantages of the method. The basic approach is a "lazy" one where PHP will only store the request when it comes in, no filtering or anything, until you want to do something with it (i.e. get it via $_GET, $_POST, etc). When the request for data is made, PHP looks at the encoding settings and formats the data accordingly.   Advantages he mentions for this method include removing the guess-work on PHP's part for which encoding the request is and that it removes some of the overhead by not processing the data until it's actually needed.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 1Developer.com: Threads Versus The Singleton PatternNick Halstead's Blog: Google Gears Caching of WordPress in PHPDevShed: PHP, MySQL and the PEAR DatabaseDave Dash's Blog: Installing a PHP that can do symfony+doctrine on DreamhostChristopher Jones' Blog: Upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on LinuxPHP.net: PHP 5.2.3 ReleasedPro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for May 31st, 2007Secunia.com: PHP Integer Overflow Vulnerability and Security BypassPHPBuilder.com: PHP and Regular Expressions 101
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In one of his recent blog entries, Brian Moon takes a look at what he considers the "proper use" of the PHP superglobal $_REQUEST (as brought on by a thread on the PHP internals mailing list.   I have seen more than one person make the following logic mistake: I may get data via GET, I may get data via POST - Ah, I should use $_REQUEST as it will catch both.   Brian points out the error - cookies aren't in $_REQUEST so improper handling of those values could lead to cookie data overwriting GET/POST data from $_REQUEST. Several of the comments on the post also warn against improper handling of the values, noting that doing so could lead to holes open for attacks (like session fixation).
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In another quick note from Chris Shiflett, there's a summary of php|works and some of the comments made about it:
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This week, Cal Evans is reporting live from this year's php/db|works conference in Toronto. Since today is "Tutorial Day", the schedule is a little lighter, and he makes to time to catch Rob Richards' talk on PHP and Advanced XML and Web Services.    Rob Richards is the author of Pro PHP XML and Web Services. He literally wrote the book on using PHP and XML together. At php|works, he is leading a tutorial on using XML in web services using the DOM extension.    If you ever get a chance to hear Rob do a presentation, let me warn you, it is not for the faint of heart. As I learned last night when I sat down with Rob to record an interview, Rob likes to speak on leading edge and advanced topics. This tutorial is an excellent example of that philosophy.    Cal talks more about the content of the talk - its simplicity despite the complex topic, how much info is jammed in, and the fact that it's not just one giant pitch for Rob's book.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest PHP community poll as voted on by visitors to their site. The question for this poll asked developers what they thought, of the choices on the list, was the most common mistake that PHP developers make.   Coming in at number one by an overwhelming lead was "Not escaping entities and SQL input" (a definite problem indeed) with the next highest option, "Not using a Framework" a full twenty percent lower. The next two options were closer (descending) - "Using old PHP versions" and "No or little use of Object Orientation".   There's a new poll this week for your consideration - this time asking which stage, of the five options, should come first in the development cycle of a typical content management system. Head on over and cast your vote today!
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Rob Richards and covering service oriented architectures in PHP.   Our special guest today is Rob Richards. Rob is an author and maintainer of many of the XML-based extensions of PHP 5, as well as one of the maintainers of libxml2. He is also the author of Pro PHP and Web Services, published by Apress. Rob is going to give us an overview of Service Oriented Architecture and what it means to us as PHP developers.   The direct link to grab the show is here, but you'd be doing yourself a favor to subscribe to the podcast feed and get all of the great content on a wide variety of topics presented by the experts.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Ian Selby's Blog: Uploading Large Files With PHPONLamp.com: Quick and Clean PHP FormsDotVoid.com: Reordering nested sets using PHP and JavascriptRob Allen's Blog: Zend Framework Book Coming SoonCommunity News: php|works Daily Summaries (Day 2)Community News: Sara Golemon & Christopher Jones - First Day Summaries of php|worksJob Posting: University of Wisconsin, Department of Medicine Seeks Web Developer (Madison, WI)Zend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 19: Glue Frameworks vs. Full Stack FrameworksStefan Mischook's Blog: Installing PHP and MySQL on the Mac with MAMPSecurityReason: Three Advisories for PHP 5.2.4 (dl, iconv_substr & setlocale)
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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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DevShed is continuing their series on PHP security with this new tutorial focusing on the security surrounding user authentication.   So far we have covered security vulnerabilities that involve form data, databases and file systems. In this article we are going to look at authentication and the security issues around it. We will also look at some of the most common attacks in this field.   They start things off by describing two of the usual authentication methods - via a login form and through HTTP authentication. They start poking a few holes by looking at some of the common attacks for these approaches including two popular ones - brute force attacks and password sniffing.
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On the PHP Security Blog, there's three new posts that Stefan Esser has written up that demonstrate some of the more destructive uses of Javascript that he's found:  JavaScript/HTML Portscanning and HTTP Auth Bruteforcing HTTP Auth in Firefox with JavaScript JavaScript Scanning and expose_php=On    While the first two are interesting, it's the last of these that most directly applies to PHP. He gives a simple "proof of concept" that checks to see if the embedded image is the correct "size" to be related to a webserver running PHP with the expose_php setting set to "on".
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In his latest post, Davey Shafik talks about a web service client that he's been working up for the Zend Framework, specifically dealing with the consuming and creation of REST services.    I am currently working on a ton of Web Services related things for the Zend Framework, one of my favorite, is the almost complete, Zend_Rest_Client. This is a replacement for Zend_Rest (as we're adding a server also).   Whilst it is almost impossible to emulate the PHP 5 SOAP extension, it is still possible to get a nice interface.    He gives some examples of its usage:   creating a client with three lines of code showing off the "fluent API" of the component to make a REST request and a call normally, seperating the methods out into seperate lines  He also mentions that there's still a bit of work to be done, including returning the Zend_Rest_Server array responses back into normal PHP arrays.
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On LinuxJournal today, there's a new article from Marco Tabini about the power of PHP as a multi-purpose language (and not just for web pages anymore).
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Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.   Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).   Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.   There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).
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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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Scott Mattocks is back with the latest installment of the PHP-GTK news, issue number 22.   It's been a while, but I finally have some time to get back to summing up the world of PHP-GTK. Things have slowed down a little in the past few months on the development side but that doesn't mean that the world of PHP-GTK 2 has stood still.   In this edition, there's a call for help for anyone that would want to join the other (4!) developers in working on the PHP-GTK 2 project as well as some general information about the project and its involvement in the community - from talks at php/db|works, International PHP Conference, and the Zend/PHP Conference to the many PHP-GTK-related articles being printed to a new online resource for PHP-GTK tutorials.
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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.