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As a dealnews web developer, you will help maintain our current stable of deal and price-tracking web sites, and build new features and new web sites as we continue to grow. You’ll be part of a small, fast-moving team of developers that are involved at every stage of product development, from concept to rollout.

We use Gentoo, Apache, PHP and MySQL.   While that does not need to be your expertise, it is a plus.  We have a little Perl and Python thrown in as well.  You will need to code on a non-Windows system as we run our development environment on our local machines.  Currently, we all use Macs.

A big plus, however, is disc golf.  We play weekly as an um, team building excercise. Yeah, team …

Problem 1 in the article at IBM developerWorks kind of rub me the wrong way.

1. Using MySQL directly

Why not? How is the second code example in that post superior to the first? What I see is that the first example, that uses mysql_* directly, is more readable. The second snippet is a jumbled mess.

The article recommends using PEAR::DB. Is PEAR::DB even PHP5 ready? I don’t know, I don’t use it. The author could have at least used PDO. Still slower, but not as bad and is the future of PHP database abstraction IMO.

He uses a prepared statement to do the select. First, I have tested and I know is slower for MySQL. Second, it is not the end all be all of stopping cross site scripting that a lot of people believe it to be. You can only pass certain value parts of certain …

Here’s a good “Addendum/Appendix/Annotation” to the original article by IBM DeveloperWorks. Along with some updated ways of doing things using MySQL 5 and stored procedures.
Updated: August 11th 11:33 AM Thanks to ds- on #php.thinktank, actual addendum is here.

Tags: php, mysql, performance

In Five Common PHP database problems, Jack Herrington writes about five common database problems that occur in PHP applications -- including database schema design, database access, and the business logic code that uses the database -- as well as their solutions

My experience in the field differs slightly from his observations, and so I thought a few annotations may be in order.

Continue reading "Annotations to "Five Common PHP database problems""

I'll warn you right now, this is going to be a long article. More than likely, I'll put a version of this up on the MySQL developer zone and PHP zone. This article is intended to highlight various basic topics concerning proper methods of handling connections to MySQL databases in PHP, guidelines for caching dynamic content, and a technique called "lazy loading". Hopefully by the end of the article you'll have learned how to combat a very widespread and potentially devastating scalability problem seen in an enormous number of PHP web applications.

An introduction to the problem

Before I start the discussion on connecting to MySQL servers via PHP, it's worth pointing out that the relative cost of connecting to a MySQL database, versus connecting to a PostgreSQL or Oracle installation, is very, very low. However, the fact that connecting to a MySQL resource is inexpensive does not mean that connection resources can be abused. …

You may have read Jo's blog entry Methods to reduce the load of your webserver by caching content: using lighttpd, MySQL UDF, LUA and speed everything up. He explained there how to use lighttpd and its mod_cml together with MySQL to provide a caching system directly at the webserver, and not at the PHP level.

Now, our good ol' friend Jan Kneschke, author of god's own webserver lighttpd (called "lighty"), mentioned in his blog ("mod_cml is dead, long live mod_cml!") that the name and functionality of mod_cml is subject to change. Why? mod_cml is not about caching only, it's about deciding how to handle a request.

"Any status code can …

If you’re interested in finding out more about SEO, SEM, and just general web design tips, I recommend you visit Web Jam Session A list of Sessions is available for those interested. Two of my friends are speaking at this conference, so I’ll be there to listen to what they say, as well as make fun of them from the audience. I know I’ll be quiet during the “Web Site Promotion” talks by Google and Yahoo!, as well as the CSS sessions. I normally do not talk about events etc that I am interested in attending, but as I make the personal transition from going to just technical events, to somewhat more “marketing/design” type events, I wanted to know what other events you guys go to.

Similar to the useless use of cat award. The useless use of if award highlights code examples where people use the if function or ternary operator when the return of the expression does the exact same thing. I first noticed this with returning boolean values from php functions. To protect the innocent the winner of today’s award will remain anonymous.

<anonymous> to my knowledge, youll have to SUM(IF(your_field <> “”, 1, 0)) as total_non_empty

Ignoring that the whole query should be using where your_field != ” and group by the non if() way to write this is:

SUM(your_field <> ”)

These examples aren’t an award to a specific person since I’m digging them up from my memory. This pretty much applies to both C and PHP.

< ?php

function foo()

{

$str = 'foo';

return $str == 'foo' ? TRUE : FALSE;
}

?>

Can be …

We think it's time to commoditize PHP web application security. You may have heard of Chorizo!. We're proud to announce that from now on it's possible to register for a free account on chorizo-scanner.com.

With this free account, it's possible to use the Chorizo! application service as a proxy and scan 1 host. All scan datas are encrypted, your data is only visible to you. There are also some valuable help documents available that explain the whole process from registering up to uploading the signature file onto your host and how to analyze the results. Please note: as Chorizo! is an application service, you can only scan your hosts that are publicly available or their firewall has the chorizo-scanner.com IP configured. For those of you who want to …

A quick note to anyone building PHP with cURL or http extension support as well as one of the MySQL extensions (mysql, mysqli and pdo_mysql). The MySQL binaries found on mysql.com are built against yaSSL as opposed to the more common openssl against which libcurl (usede by cURL and HTTP extensions) is linked. The conflict between the two libraries causes curl initialization of the SSL layer to fail preventing startup of the PHP extensions.

To fix this problem you can either use older mysqlclient binaries (5.0.18 works) or compile MySQL yourself against openssl, either of these two will allow a working build of PHP with MySQL and curl support.