Archive for October 13th, 2006
PHP Developer - October 13th, 2006
From a pointer from the Zend Developer Zone, there’s a link to this case study of the creation of a search engine surrounding the Zend_Search component of the Zend Framework.
We have implemented Zend_Search into our content management system “Click and Change” and we would like to share our experiences with the developers’ community. For this purpose, we decided to publish the complete source code and it’s documentation.
They give a great overview of the application, from some of the interesting things they came across during development to some of the feedback/questions they’ve already recieved about the project. They have the source code for each of the files in the search engine, including small changes made after the fact. You can also download the entire project in one zipped up file.
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PHP Developer - October 13th, 2006
The Vancouver PHP group is holding a conference this year at the UBC Downtown Campus in Vancouver, British Columbia and have announced their Call for Papers for this 2007 confernece.
Mark these dates down on your calender, make sure that you keep these dates open.
Please join the “PHP Conference 2007 Organizing Committee”, if you are interested to volunteer, and contact us if you wish to speak.
The conference will be happening February 12th and 13th, starting at 8am the first day and ending at 5pm the second. If you are interested in participating as a speaker or sponsor, please email Shane Caraveo at shanec AT ActiveState DOT com.
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PHP Developer - October 13th, 2006
The Zend Developer Zone brings the community yet another great tutorial on using the Zend Framework to accomplish a popularly requested feature - making search engine friendly sites.
The Zend Framework allows for websites that are search engine friendly, although some thought needs to be taken when building your application. Believe it or not, building a site that is search engine friendly can also yield usability benefits.
The author (robbolton) jumps right in to things, assuming you know the framework any your way around. He starts with the creation of a table for the articles to give the system a little background info to work with and a corresponding class to work with it. Next up is the controllers for the templating, complete with an indexAction, noRouteAction, and a __call method to handle the 404s.
Then comes the fun part - creating the viewAction to handle the incoming request and round the search engine firnedly request to the correct article information. He even throws in an addAction for the Articles class to help you input the information.
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PHP Developer - October 13th, 2006
Based on some perspectives he gained at this year’s PHP Appalachia event and at a Triangle-PHP meeting (talking with David Rasch, Ben Ramsey shares his thoughts on how to teach PHP, more specifically to those with some programming background, but not necessarily a lot of experience.
He (David) suggested that the format for teaching PHP needs to change and that these books need to start not by teaching PHP from the Web but by introducing newbies to PHP concepts by creating command-line applications. The idea being to introduce them early on to OOP and best practices, rather than trying to get them started fast with a simple “Hello, World” Web site.
For Ben, the idea was agreeable, but he wasn’t sure on whether or not such an approach would take off with the current book market. He does agree with David, though, that things need to change.
As far as David, his thoughts can be best summed up with this post on his blog, talking about a way to learn PHP without some of the drudge they pass along with the lessons in some of the “Learn PHP Now!” kinds of books. He even includes a table of contents for such a book.
So, which is the better of the two? Well, book publishers still think the second (the give examples and teach practices too) is the proven formula for a good PHP book, but maybe a company out there could benefit from Ben and David’s suggestion of a no-nonsense, clean, easy book that fosters an approach supporting the basics, not someone’s opinion of good code.
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PHP Developer - October 13th, 2006
On the O’Reilly OnLamp.com site, there’s a bit more in-depth look at using the (now infamous) Google Code Search to locate issues with scripts that have been collected over time.
I’ve written about using Google to find security flaws in the past. However, thanks to Google Code Search, it is now easier to scan publicly available source code for potential security issues. The idea is query Google Code Search using techniques previously reserved for local static code analysis.
The examples he gives include a search for SQL injection in a Java application, a SQL injection in a PHP application, and a cross-site scripting problem in a PHP app blindly echoing out the user’s input.
He also includes a few links to some code analysis tools that can be used to help prevent some of these issues - Flawfinder, RATS, and SWAAT
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