Latest PHP Classes blog posts

PHP 5.5 Release Date Imminent - Lately in PHP podcast episode 36

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:42:44 GMT

PHP 5.5 Release Date Imminent - Lately in PHP podcast episode 36

By Manuel Lemos

The PHP 5.5.0 final release is about to happen. After about 16 months of development PHP 5.5 is bringing even more maturity to the PHP language, which by Google numbers is present in 75% of the Web sites.

This was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in the episode 36 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also discussed some new features proposed for PHP 5.6 like incremental decoding of large JSON data streams and overloading arithmetic operators for arbitrary precision math.

They also debated the meaning of Google finally adding support to PHP in their cloud hosting platform Google AppEngine.

Also in this episode it was discussed an article about good practices to quickly detect and fix PHP code bugs that only show up in production environments.

Listen to the podcast, or watched the Google hangout video, or read the text transcript to learn more about these very interesting PHP topics.

10 Steps to properly do PHP Bug Tracking and Fixing as Fast as possible

Wed, 29 May 2013 19:18:36 GMT

10 Steps to properly do PHP Bug Tracking and Fixing as Fast as possible

By Manuel Lemos

No matter how hard you try to test your PHP applications before putting them in production, you will always ship code to your server that has bugs.

Some of those bugs will be very serious and need to be fixed before they cause greater damages to your application data that may be too hard to recover.

Read this article to learn about a several good practices that you can apply to track bugs in production code, so you can fix them before it is too late.

5 Reasons Why the Web Platform War is Over: PHP Won with 75% says Google

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:43:11 GMT

5 Reasons Why the Web Platform War is Over: PHP Won with 75% says Google

By Manuel Lemos

During Google I/O 2013 event a Google manager said PHP runs on 75% of the Web sites. So they decided to finally support PHP as in their AppEngine hosting service.

Read this article to understand why this puts an end to years of false claims that PHP was losing market, as well what it means to Web developers using PHP or other languages.

Better Documentation for PHP internals - Lately in PHP podcast episode 35

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:32:16 GMT

Better Documentation for PHP internals - Lately in PHP podcast episode 35

By Manuel Lemos

With the inclusion of Zend Optimizer+ extension in PHP 5.5, the need for better documentation of PHP internals became more evident, so PHP contributors can write extensions that take the most of the core PHP features.

That is one of the topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in the episode 35 of the Lately In PHP podcast.

They also talked about having more optimized PHP opcodes, some interesting PHP feature proposals that got rejected, as well the article about the top version control systems used by PHP developers.

Listen to this podcast, or watch the hangout video, or read the transcript to learn more about this and other interesting PHP discussions.

Using Grep to Find Security Vulnerabilities in PHP code

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:50:47 GMT

Using Grep to Find Security Vulnerabilities in PHP code

By Ryan Dewhurst

Finding all security vulnerabilities in a piece of code may be hard as it requires in depth analysis of what the code does. However, simple security vulnerabilities follow certain code style patterns that are easier to find with simple search tools.

Read this article to learn how you can find certain types of security vulnerabilities very quickly using the grep program.

Top Version Control Systems used by PHP Developers

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:17:53 GMT

Top Version Control Systems used by PHP Developers

By Manuel Lemos

Version Control Systems are important tools that every developer should be using. However, for many developers version control systems do not make part of their development tool set.

Read this article to learn what are version control systems, why they are so important to be used by all developers, and what are the most popular systems used by PHP developers.

Offline Access to Google and other OAuth based API

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:11:34 GMT

Offline Access to Google and other OAuth based API

By Manuel Lemos

Some applications require access to APIs on behalf of the user even when the user is not present, i.e. offline access.

OAuth is a protocol that allows applications to obtain a token to access an API when the user is not present but when the tokens expire they need to be renewed.

Some APIs like Google and Box.net support automatic renewal of expired tokens.

Read this article to learn how to use this OAuth client class to perform offline access to an API storing tokens in a database and how to have expired tokens automatically renewed.

A Better PHP Feature Voting Process - Lately in PHP podcast episode 34

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:26:38 GMT

A Better PHP Feature Voting Process - Lately in PHP podcast episode 34

By Manuel Lemos

The current PHP feature voting process causes problems to those that do not know why features are approved or rejected by each voter. A better solution was proposed to require justification for each feature vote.

This was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Cesar Rodas on the episode 34 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also discussed about the latest PHP releases, updating PHP with minimized downtime, as well how brilliant are some developers for creating pure PHP components that overcome PHP limitations without upgrading to a newer PHP version.

Listen to the podcast, or watch the hangout video or read the transcript to learn more about these interesting PHP discussions.

26 Ways to Show that PHP Can Be Better Than PHP

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:36:45 GMT

26 Ways to Show that PHP Can Be Better Than PHP

By Manuel Lemos

The fact that PHP has limitations does not mean that it is not possible to overcome some those limitations with alternative solutions that use only pure PHP code and do not require a newer PHP version.

Read this article to learn about many creative solutions that several PHP developers implemented to overcome some of the PHP limitations.

PHP Innovation Award Winner of 2012 - Lately in PHP podcast episode 33

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:56:24 GMT

PHP Innovation Award Winner of 2012 - Lately in PHP podcast episode 33

By Manuel Lemos

The PHP Programming Innovation Award Winner of 2012 was announced. An interview with the winner, Karl Holz from Canada, was one of the main topics of the episode 33 of the Lately in PHP podcast conducted by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert.

They also discussed the usual batch of PHP topics of interest like Zend Optimizer+ source code that was released, the PHP 5.5 feature freeze and roadmap, as well an article that compares PHP to an Hobbit, as well other languages to Lord Of The Rings story characters.

Listen to the podcast, or watch the podcast video, or read the transcript to learn about these and other interesting PHP topics.