PHP Developer - March 30th, 2007
The Zend Developer Zone has posted an interview with the two authors of one of APress’ latest releases, “The Definitive Guide to symfony” - Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier.
Frameworks are everywhere in the PHP community these days. Different frameworks fill different needs and have different personalities behind them. Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier, the driving forces behind the symfony framework. Not too long ago, symfony released their 1.0 milestone version. They have also released their extensive documentation in print from Apress, as well as on the web.
The questions range from the usual “how did you get started with PHP” out to questions about the book, about the framework, and about the documentation surrounding both.
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PHP Developer - March 30th, 2007
On the Bakery (the CakePHP blog), there’s a new case study on how a group of developers created a “Web 2.0 dating site in 66.5 hours” (just short of 3 days worth of work).
Let this be a testament to Web 2.0 and the effectiveness of rapid development frameworks: I built a full-featured dating website (http://mingle2.com), from concept to launch, in 66.5 hours. In a typical 9-5 job this would amount to about a week and a half. Deliverables included: the idea, planning, design, development, testing, and launch.
The study is broken up into the (long list of) key steps that were followed:
- Identify an Opportunity
- Brain-dump
- Generate ideas from your competition
- Brain-dump some more
- Have a specific goal, don’t try to make the website do everything
- Keep. It. Simple. Stupid
- Minimize interference
- Avoid “feature creep”
- Web 2.0 names are going to be very tacky in a few years
- If you get stuck on something, put it on the backburner
- Prioritize features so you can give prominent real estate to those that need it
- Put a lot of work into the functional mockups
- Mix it up, keep things interesting
And finally, “The Design” where he looked at achieving balance, got a “holy crap, that’s pretty” reaction, and to make things look up to date. The end result of the labor is mingle2.com, a 100% free online dating website.
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PHP Developer - March 30th, 2007
On his blog, Oscar Merida has a quick new post those just starting out with sessions should take a look at. He gives four quick tips of things to watch out for that can help your development process go smoother.
PHP’s support for sessions make adding “state” to your web application super easy. Bus because the illusion of state is maintained by storing a Session ID via a user’s cookies, you might find yourself losing potentially productive hours chasing down bizarre client side bugs or opening up a potential security hole. Here are 4 tips to help you avoid wasting your time and securing your site.
Items on the list are:
- Don’t use underscores in host names
- Commit your sessions before redirects
- Prevent session fixation (great security tip!)
- Don’t expose session_id’s
Check out the comments - there’s some good recommendations in there as well.
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