PHP programming has climbed rapidly since its humble beginnings in 1995. Since then, PHP has become the most popular programming language for Web applications. Many popular websites are powered by PHP, and an overwhelming majority of scripts and Web projects are built with the popular language.
Because of PHP’s huge popularity, it has become almost impossible for Web developers not to have at least a working knowledge of PHP. This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.
Designing a modular and component-based directory structure for your Web applications can seem like an easy task. If your system is small, it may seem logical to go with the simplest design possible, but if there’s anything more time consuming and complex than developing a new directory structure design, it’s trying to redesign an existing system that wasn’t developed with growth in mind.
The first part of this article, "Real-World PHP Security", appeared in the April 2004 issue of Linux Journal and covered the subject of secure PHP development. This article takes you, the professional PHP developer, one step further, by providing detailed explanations and reliable source code that illustrate the steps to follow in order to develop successful PHP applications.
One day or another, every developer faces a situation in which he/she is responsible for extending the functionality of an existing application or prepare an application for an increase in use and traffic (scaling up). Our goal today is to make this process trivial by learning to develop applications based on a clean, elegant and modular design that is secure, reliable and flexible while keeping it all simple.
The RESTful Web Services book provides three basic rules for URI design, born of collective experience:
1. Use path variables to encode hierarchy: /parent/child
2. Put punctuation characters in path variables to avoid implying hierarchy where none exists: /parent/child1;child2
3. Use query variables to imply inputs into an algorithm, for example: /search?q=jellyfish&start=20
We have come up with very much the same principles in our designs. The second rule however seems to be rarely used in practice.
Often, with little rhyme or reason behind it, I choose between using a switch condition or an if-else statement while coding simple condition matches in PHP. I got curious about which is actually more efficient at matching a random integer with a set of conditionals. So, I setup a script to create a set of large scripts to test the speed of these different constructs. Using the 'time' command, I measured the speed at which the condition could match a random number. Here is what I found:
The switch construct is generally more than twice as fast at matching a simple integer within a single large set of conditions.
There’s always a bridge between textbook knowledge of programming - syntax, procedure etc. - and the real world knowledge that you get from actually developing real applications. Here are five things every PHP developer should be familiar with before they begin developing web applications in PHP.
It is not only due to his paper on the emerging usage of Domain Specific Languages, nor solely because of his useful advice on continuous integration techniques, but because of the way he describes the refactoring process for computer languages.
At first, refactoring seemed to me to be magic, over the years I have come to view it as more of a trick, and today refactoring is integrated into my development environment and used frequently and quickly. Using the refactoring functionality, in addition to other tools, I can sculpt the code to improve legibility and maintainability.
In this article I will present refactoring's strengths, and then argue that PHP developers and framework designers should immediately adopt refactoring's capabilities. Refactoring, together with other important tools, has resulted in PHP catching up with other languages that stress scalability, for Web applications and Web services enterprise applications.
Article explains, how to implement events in the PHP programming language, using the call_user_func() function.
Ah, hindsight: like foresight, but without a future! I hate articles that being with "in hindsight..." on principle, but it's sometimes useful to take a look at the past to map out a better future.
The talk contains an overview on how to behave when coding PHP in respect to
* General guidelines
and gives a general overview on useful tools around PHP development.