Archive for December 1st, 2006
PHP Developer - December 1st, 2006
The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of a PHP-related offering from the APress Publishing company - Rob Richards’s “Pro Pro PHP XML and Web Services”.
Crack the front cover though and you’ll soon discover that your new phone-book sized shield contains a lot of useful information. Let’s dive into it a bit, shall we?
Cal talks about the contents of the book - all the way from the history of XML out to things like Web APIs, XML-RPC, and REST. He goes through, spotlighting some of the chapters along the way (including those on SimpleXML, syndication, and RSS/Atom formats). There’s only one real complaint that Cal has about the book, one that’s immediately evident to anyone that sees or holds the book in their hands - the sheer size and quantity of the material covered in the book (almost 1,000 pages).
Continue Reading ·
PHP Developer - December 1st, 2006
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:
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”.
Continue Reading ·
PHP Developer - December 1st, 2006
On CodeSnipers.com there’s a new book review of one of O’Reilly’s PHP-related offerings, “PHP Hacks” by “Jack D. Herrington”.
I had borrowed a Perl Hacks book from and friend and really liked it, it was great! It had a lot of practical things as well as some fun things. I expected the same from PHP Hacks and I was not disappointed!
She links to both the table of contents and the sample chapter to give you an idea of the feel of the book. There’s two main sections in the review covering both aspects of the book - the Practical Stuff and the Fun Stuff. Of course, no book is perfect, so there is one thing she mentions that wasn’t really worked into the book, but you’ll need to read the review to find out what.
Continue Reading ·
PHP Developer - December 1st, 2006
In a new post, Christopher Jones talks about some difficulty a friend of his was having with returning a connection type from Oracle back to a script. In his case, it was a Ruby script and, unfortunately, there’s no direct support for it. So, Christopher jumped in to help out.
PHP’s oci8 extension oci_bind_array_by_name() can bind collections but there is no equivalent in ruby-oci8.
Justin outlines a solution on his blog Ruby: Invoking a PL/SQL Package with Array args. His example relies on some company infrastructure so I came up with this standalone example. This first SQL*Plus script sets up the scenario.
Stick with me on this one - there’s some PHP right there at the end. He shows how much simpler the same kind of operation would be in PHP thanks to the oci_bind_array_by_name functionality understanding the return value. What took about 20 lines for just the Ruby code to handle the result correctly takes only five in PHP.
Continue Reading ·
PHP Developer - December 1st, 2006
On DevShed today, there’s the second part in a two part series (another excerpt from the “Zend PHP Certification” from Zend) talking about getting the most out of your application and platform through some simple debugging/optimizing tools.
They start off with a look at debuggers - what they’re for and a brief mention (high level) of how to use them. Next up is some simple suggestions for optimizing the performance of your application:
- Hardware issues
- Web server issues
- Avoid overkill
- Zip it up
- Database optimizations
They also include a simple recommendation that all developers, looking for performance boosts or not should follow - “keep your code simple”.
Continue Reading ·