The PHP Grind

Zend Developer Zone: Notes from the Web Builder 2.0 Conference

Cal Evans has posted his notes from the (just passed) Web Builder 2.0 Conference that happened over in Las Vegas. PHP had its presence there through Cal’s “PHP Powers Mashups” talk and others like Chris Shiflett.

There was plenty to see and do at the conference besides PHP and Cal highlights just a few:

• AJAX Optimization talks
• An overview of some Flickr Stats
• Google’s mashup offerings
• An introduction to
• and some talk of benchmarking Ajax

Check out the full post though - it’s jam-packed with links and some great event information.

Continue Reading · Add comment

Cocoliso’s Blog: Adding A Syntax Highlighter To Your Site: The Power Of Geshi

On his blog today, Cocoliso talks about a handy bit of code to allow for syntax highlighting in your page - Geshi.

What if I told you that with as little as 3 lines of code, you could highlight code on your site? You’d jump at it, wouldn’t you? Why not run with the big boys? Your users will love you for it and for good reason. It greatly increases readability.

He walks through the simple installation and how to use it in your page - complete with the code he uses to include the functionality in your page.

Continue Reading · Add comment

Pierre-Alain Joye’s Blog: htscanner 0.6.1

Pierre has posted a quick update about the release of a new version of his htscanner package:

0.6.1 has just been released. It is a bug fixes release only. One leak and some string optimizations. See the full changelong here.

You can get this latest build and the latest information on the htscanner package from it’s PECL homepage.

Continue Reading · Add comment

PHP Security Blog: Cross Virtual Host Cookie Theft

In this new post on the PHP Security Blog, Stefan Esser brings up an interesting issue when dealing with web applications - being able to bind a script/application to a different port on the local machine.

Unfortunately the ability to bind yourself to a port and receive connections is a threat to webapplications installed on different virtual hosts on the same IP, even if other security measures in place, like tight filesystem permissions or executing PHP script with the permission of the owner.

He gives an example in PHP of how this can happen and one of the scary side effects of having it in the same domain - the cookie information is passed in. It’s a simple concept that could have very bad consequences in the wrong hands.

Additionally, you don’t even have to create it in PHP either. As cyberlot mentions, it could be created in any language that has socket functions. Be sure to check out the comments for more thoughts and comments on the post.

Continue Reading · Add comment

Maarten Balliauw’s Blog: Office 2007 SpreadsheetML classes in PHP

On the Zend Developer Zone today, there’s a new post from Maarten Balliauw about a set of PHP classes he’s created to work with Office 2007 SpreadsheetML documents (yay! another format!).

I finished my first goals (some basic XLSX writing), and I want to share this set of classes to the community. […] Each cell supports the following data formats: string, number, formula, boolean. Visual formatting is not implemented, but I’ll get to that later.

Features supported currently include the creation of the Spreadsheet object, adding worksheets, adding cells, and exporting the object to the Excel 2007 OpenXML format.

You can check out the project and the latest version over on his blog.

Continue Reading · Add comment