Archive for Category: PHP
Blog Death Knoll
I’m a bit overdue on writing up my thoughts on the third annual DC PHP Conference, but I had been considering how to re-purpose this blog to allow me to post more frequently on a more tightly focused set of topics, so actually writing has been on the back burner, metaphorically speaking. The conclusion I’ve […]
Zend_Filter_Input and arrays
Here’s a quick tidbit that I discovered a few months back, forgot to document and it bit me in the rear just now. If you’re using Zend_Filter_Input for input validation in your applications, and you’re expecting the incoming data to be a multi-dimensional array, be sure not filter any keys that contain an array, as […]
DC PHP Conference
The 2007 DC PHP Conference is right around the corner, and they have posted the Keynotes and Plenary Sessions today. There are a number of great speakers, running the gamut from performance to application design to interfaces to coding style. The sessions that seem particularly interesting to me are API design in PHP by David […]
ZF overview from Nick Halstead
Nick Halstead and the developers at Assembleron recently launched a new service Fav.or.it, which is an RSS reader, and allows you to comment on the posts you’re reading. Pretty smart! Tangentially, there has been something of a comment backlash from a few of the software world’s most outspoken voices this year, so I find the […]
Zend Framework speed
Richard Thomas put together a performance comparison of basic PHP, the Zend Framework, the Solar framework and Richard’s custom framework, and the results surprised me. ZF is slow as molasses. Of course, any framework is going to incur overhead compared to all custom code because the framework is managing a number of tasks transparently from […]
Date validation in Zend Framework
The Zend Framework has a powerful set of validation features, ranging from predefined data type checking (like email addresses and DNS hostnames) to classes for chaining together validations and input filters to create custom validation stacks. Since Rule #1 of web application security is Don’t trust ANYTHING that comes from the browser, I use […]
DCPHP presentation
I’ll be giving a presentation on Subversion for the monthly DCPHP Developers Meeting tomorrow at 7pm. If you’re in the DC area and are interested in meeting some of your peers, and possibly learning something, swing by. It’s in the Greenpeace office at:
702 H Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20001
Here’s the Powerpoint presentation, but it has been […]
Zend Framework - Filename Case Sensitivity
Just a note if you’ve recently upgraded from Zend Framework 1.0.0 RC3 or earlier to the newly released 1.0.0 milestone: the Controller Action Helper ViewRenderer now only looks for view scripts that have filenames which are all lowercase. This change probably won’t affect too many users, but in the application I’m developing, I have some […]
Magento - Open Source e-commerce
An open source project I’m very excited about is Magento, a new e-commerce package. E-commerce was one of the very first application domains that was tackled when the web starting becoming popular in the mid to late Nineties. There are many, many commercial packages that are available, and correspondingly, there are a few free open […]
Object Relational Mappers
I’ve always been a bit skeptical about Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools in PHP. Why provide an object wrapper around a database if you have to know all the details of your database schema to start with? Isn’t the point of objects to hide complexity? To my eyes, using an ORM to save a 1:* […]
