March 2008
Monthly Archive
Mon 31 Mar 2008
In a new entry on his blog today, Matthew looks to answer and help those once and for all wondering how to handle user authentication and persistence in their Zend Framework applications.
The typical issue is that they’re unsure how to combine: an authentication adapter, a login form, a controller for login/logout actions and checking for an authenticated user in subsequent requests. It’s not terribly difficult, but it does require knowing how the various pieces of the MVC fit together, and how to use Zend_Auth. Let’s take a look.
He gives the complete code for a loin controller to cover most of that functionality and an example showing how to check for and keep track of which users have been authenticated.
Mon 31 Mar 2008
Lukas Smith got a chance to catch up with Rasmus Lerdorf (and others in #php.pecl) and “talk shop” about topics including handling large libraries and maxclients settings.
In this first post I will provide a link and some commentary on Rasmus’s points regarding Doctrine (note I left independent chatter in the log in order to not have any chance of me filtering the content, but there is very little of that so I hope the discussion is still easy enough to follow).
Lukas introduces Doctrine briefly (what it does) along with some general thoughts on ORMs and making code a bit more bye code cache friendly.
Mon 31 Mar 2008
On the Developer Tutorials site today, Akash Mehta has posted his look at having search functionality on your website.
Today’s websites have a lot of content. […] Needless to say, effectively searching all that data can be a real challenge, and chances are at the end of the day you’ll still be stuck with a slow and ineffective search system. […] Implementing effective search doesn’t have to be hard. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to build a basic site-specific web search in just five lines of code, using the Yahoo! APIs.
He includes a (very) brief look at the search API Yahoo! offers followed by examples of queries and then on to the real deal, a search system that takes in a user query and asks the Yahoo! API for results matching it. The results are outputted below the box.
Mon 31 Mar 2008
On the PHP.net website, the official announcement for TestFest 2008 has been posted:
The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together.
The event is not only a teamwork/friendship building effort but will also help out the PHP.net mentors in a serious way - testing has largely been their responsibility and having a wealth of user-submitted tests to help out cuts their workload dramatically.
You can find out how to get you and your local PHP user group involved, head over to the TestFest homepage.
Mon 31 Mar 2008
The WebReference.com website has an introductory tutorial showing the budding PHP develper how to get started with one of the keys to web application interaction - forms.
Forms are how your users talk to your scripts. To get the most out of PHP, you must master forms. The first thing you need to understand is that although PHP makes it easy to access form data, you must be careful of how you work with the data.
The first part of the tutorial is focused on something many applications don’t worry about - the security and integrity of the data submitted to them. They talk about things like filtering and various other checks to ensure that the data you’re getting is good. They also mention the method for putting submitted values into PHP arrays, checking for valid values, using multiple submit buttons and an example of some of these methods all put together - validating a credit card number.
Mon 31 Mar 2008
Sat 29 Mar 2008
Job postings for the past week:
Fri 28 Mar 2008
A little while back, Alan Knowles wondered something that I’m sure has crosses the mind of every PHP developer out there, especially when they came across a particularly bad chunk of code - some people should need to apply for a license before releasing their PHP code out into the wild.
Unlike most of the reviews you get, I was specifically looking at code quality [of the CMSs]. not fuzzy does it look nice!
He looks at a whole list of them including: Tanslucis, Siteman, Pivot, jaf-cms, Guppy, Doop and CutePHP. Unfortunately, most of the news is bad - between badly structured code and mixes of HTML and PHP, there was almost nothing good in any of them.
Fri 28 Mar 2008
In a (very) quick note on his blog today Stoyan Stefanov points out that a presentation of his posted over on Slideshare made the front page Featured section (with over 2600 views too!).
Not bad. Especially having in mind that this is the second time around. […] Slideshare is a great service nevertheless, just like on youtube, you can spend hours browsing people’s presentation slides.
The presentation was originally given at the PHP Quebec conference this year (2008).
Fri 28 Mar 2008
On his blog today, Stefan Mischook has posted his take on some of the killer PHP projects that are out there:
Part of PHP’s power is actually found in the variety of open source (free to use) PHP based applications. I’m talking about things like blogs, web frameworks, forums, CMS’ etc. I was just thinking, that a list of ‘killer’ PHP open source projects would be useful
There four on his list so far - WordPress, the Zend Framework, Drupal and Punbb.
To be totally honest about it, we’ve seen much of the good stuff coming out of the PHP world, in the last few years. PHP developers are leap-frogging ahead with regards to their level of skill and the quality of code they produce.
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