Archive for May 7th, 2007
PHP Developer - May 7th, 2007
Matthew O’Phinney has a great new blog post today on the topic so many developers don’t even think about when working up their applications - making apps that aren’t “loners” and are embeddable.
“Why embed?” you ask. Simple: if I’m creating a site that has one or two of these applications, but also my (or my company’s) own custom functionality, I may want to ensure that certain elements are present on all pages, or that I can control some of the content in all pages: a unified header and footer, ability to inject statistic tracking javascript, etc.
The predominant attitudes are either, “Don’t embed our app, embed your app in ours,” or “Just modify the templates.” Neither of these solutions is acceptable.
He proposes a few helpful hints to those developing applications right now to have them be that much more “embeddable” like:
- When using configuration files, use a configuration component that doesn’t require use of the global namespace
- Have your bootstrap script call on class methods or functions to do their work
- Better yet, use an MVC pattern in your apps
- Make sure your templates are easily modified to allow developers to strip out header, footer, and menu elements
- Create an API to allow retrieving necessary javascript and CSS
- Don’t use $_GLOBALS ever.
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PHP Developer - May 7th, 2007
In response to an earlier blog post from another member of the PHP community, Greg Beaver has posted a few thoughts he’s had on sharing what’s really going on with the PEAR project.
Newly elected PEAR Group member Josh Eichorn posted a blog entry, “How would you improve PEAR” recently. I was impressed with the response, it seems many people outside of PEAR are monitoring it and have thought about how to make it better. However, I was also not so impressed with the poor job we’ve done letting people know about the newest improvements to PEAR. In my comments, I listed as many as I could think of, but Josh pointed out that I would do well to post these comments in a more public setting, so here goes.
He notes that most of the items mentioned in the comments of Joshua’s post are already implemented, save for one - CVS over Subversion. He also shares his renewed obligation of working on the social issues surrounding the project and the efforts that the project is doing to help current developers (stable works the same) and development (get involved! get active!).
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PHP Developer - May 7th, 2007
The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out an interesting article written up by Alistair “Woolie” Wooldrige titled Is PHP Insecure? Hell No!
Its quite a common occurrence to hear that PHP has been described as “Insecure”. You will hear this among many developers that choose not to use PHP. However, this bad light has been created by it’s users. Let me explain.
He’s broken it up into three different sections - putting PHP in the name, that it’s too easy to learn, and that there is a need for some further security in most of the PHP applications out there (even the ones that have security - there’s always room for improvement).
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PHP Developer - May 7th, 2007
If all you’re needing is a simple bar chart for your website, check out this new tutorial from AnyExample.com. It provides a simple, one function method to creating the image.
This article contains PHP function ae_bar_html for generating HTML/CSS based one-column bar charts. It is suitable for simple diagrams and does not require libgd.
The function takes in the values, the default height of the tallest bar, the colors to make the bars and the width of each of the columns. As a variation, they also provide a CSS-based version (versus just the standard HTML) and include examples of it in use.
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PHP Developer - May 7th, 2007
According to this announcement on the Zend Developer Zone, the latest version of the Zend Framework (still beta, but almost there!) has been released - Beta 0.9.3.
This is an update to the Zend Framework Beta Release. The Zend Framework developers have been working very hard to improve the quality every week, and this Beta Refresh release includes their efforts so far. There have been 77 issues fixed since 0.9.2.
Updates in this release also include major changes to several modules - Zend_Controller, Zend_Db, Zend_Filter_Input, Zend_Pdf, and Zend_Service. Check out the Changelog for complete information on the updates.
There’s also some great news included:
The next release should be Zend Framework 1.0.0 release candidate 1. The purpose of the 1.0 release is to reach a state of feature and API stability, and future development must enforce backward-compatibility. When we reach the milestone of 1.0.0 RC1, we will create a branch in our source code repository.
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