php|architect

Sandcastles & Security

Keith Casey — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:00:58 +0000

After playing with Flex off and on for a couple of months, I decided I would try to break it. I’m not a security guy at heart, but I’ve listened closely and improved my own stuff, so I quickly came up with four ways that I might be able to cause problems with Flex. Here are my results with each. To be clear, it is not my goal to be a nefarious troublemaker and break everything. My goal is to find out where things could break.

PHP 5.3.3 and 5.2.14 are out

Giorgio Sironi — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:09:50 +0000

July 22 has seen the release of two new versions of PHP - the innovator 5.3.x and the previous 5.2.x. There are interesting news for both these new releases.

ORMs and relational databases: powerful tools or dumb ideas?

Giorgio Sironi — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:00:59 +0000

Object-relational mappers are seen either as an abomination or as a life-saving tool. In the PHP world, they have appeared only in the last years.

PHPDOCX: generating Word documents from PHP

Giorgio Sironi — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:22:22 +0000

PHPDOCX is a PHP library that allows its client code to generate Microsoft Word documents in the .docx format from PHP scripts, or to output PDF and HTML from a given Word document.

Ext4Yii, bridging PHP and JavaScript frameworks together

Giorgio Sironi — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:00:40 +0000

Ext4Yii is one of the numerous solution to bring a JavaScript framework into a PHP one with ease.

Modsecurity: Why it matters to PHP

Orlando Medina — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:00:14 +0000

ModSecurity Handbook:The Complete Guide to the Popular Open Source Web Application Firewall by Ivan Ristic. What is ModSecurity in the first place? Why does it matter to you? What makes this book important to the practice of web application design?

Never Use $_GET Again

Matt Butcher — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:00:37 +0000

How many times have we heard about security issues in PHP applications stemming from unescaped GET and POST parameters? Proper escaping of input is a perennial problem with web development in general, and for whatever reason PHP seems to have had more than its fair share of bad publicity on this front.

Zend Db 2.0 Kicks Off

Bill Karwin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:47:55 +0000

Ralph Schindler has started the ball rolling on requirements for Zend Db for Zend Framework 2.0. He announced on the ZF Contributors mailing list: Requirements have been solicited from both community members in various conversations, as well as looking through the issue tracker for feature requests that have been on the backlog due to potential BC [...]

Simplicity made complicated: character encoding

Jordi Roura — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:43:06 +0000

What could be simpler than a string? And yet strings tend to get tied up and knotted, and give us a hell of a time... specially when in a hurry. They may seem sleek, clean and simple, but ugly hairy beasts hide in the shadows...

Open source life style

Giorgio Sironi — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:54:25 +0000

Participation in the open source community and projects can really give a boost to your career.