So, I read a post by Chris Schifflet about a book titled Upgrading to PHP 5. I must say, this book is awesome. I've only gotten to chapter 2 , but thats because of the excellent writing and explanation of some of the reasons why PHP 5 is doing things the way it is. I believe I'm in the majority of PHP developers, where we don't have a formal background in programming. I took 1 C++ course in community college in 1997. Since then, I've written in perl, php, and a little bit of Java. This is a great book to read if you want to figure out what exactly is new in PHP 5, and why you want to use it. I have started writing a new program that will run 100% in PHP 5 strict …

I am happy to announce that the SQL Injection chapter from my book, Guide to PHP Security has been published on MySQL's developer zone. You can find this chapter here.

So about a month ago we put in a new hosting infrastructure and me as the sole admin needed an easy way to monitor and keep an eye on all of my servers and the services and resources of each server.



So after some digging around I found that an application I use to use was now a new application Nagios. Now this application is great, took me about 2 days to set everything up as it is now, but once I found everything i needed it was great. Nagios uses SNMP Protocol to monitor almost anything on your server. It has a very OO configuration allowing you to reach some pretty complex setups. Mine didn't get too complex so i can't speak to all of that but it was pretty easy to setup once I got the hang of it. After I found these two Nagios Plugin pages I knew I was truely in heaven. …

MySQL 5.0 is out. With a nice contest to win a Nano. If you’re so inclined. I have setup a PHP 5.1 and MySQL 5 server, that will be available to anyone who needs it, and has a project they want to test. MySQL 5, is running in strict mode. PHP 5.1 is built with mysqli extension only.
You must be familiar with a linux shell, sftp, and mysql. I really encourage you to report bugs etc, to the MySQL and PHP developers. The point of this is to allow people to test their own apps, and their favorite OSS apps (phpBB, mambo, etc), work with MySQL 5, and PHP. Contact me via email, or comment here.

MySQL 5.0 is out. With a nice contest to win a Nano. If you're so inclined. I have setup a PHP 5.1 and MySQL 5 server, that will be available to anyone who needs it, and has a project they want to test. MySQL 5, is running in strict mode. PHP 5.1 is built with mysqli extension only. You must be familiar with a linux shell, sftp, and mysql. I really encourage you to report bugs etc, to the MySQL and PHP developers. The point of this is to allow people to test their own apps, and their favorite OSS apps (phpBB, mambo, etc), work with MySQL 5, and PHP. Contact me via email, or comment here.

IE More Secure Than Mozilla? Just reading this thread on our favorite unbiased source of “news” for nerds. The poster would like us to examine some valid points, namely IE’s integration with the OS, and the higher “caliber” if you want to use that term, of bugs or flaws. Secondly, the point about the ability to uninstall firefox. He goes on to say that the report uses extremely flawed logic, and that Symantec is shilling for MS. I’d say a little bit of both is happening, and it’s happening by Symantec AND the poster.

My beef, I guess is with the statement that because it’s open source, the large number of eyeballs will make the code more secure. Sure, for the next version.. but who will upgrade ? How do you force someone to upgrade ? Sure, the latest and greatest is secure, but I have to routinely upgrade FF for my friends and …

IE More Secure Than Mozilla? Just reading this thread on our favorite unbiased source of "news" for nerds. The poster would like us to examine some valid points, namely IE's integration with the OS, and the higher "caliber" if you want to use that term, of bugs or flaws. Secondly, the point about the ability to uninstall firefox. He goes on to say that the report uses extremely flawed logic, and that Symantec is shilling for MS. I'd say a little bit of both is happening, and it's happening by Symantec AND the poster.

My beef, I guess is with the statement that because it's open source, the large number of eyeballs will make the code more secure. Sure, for the next version.. but who will upgrade ? How do you force someone to upgrade ? Sure, the latest and greatest is secure, but I have to routinely upgrade FF for my friends and family all the time. …

So, I’ve been tasked to write an application at work, from scratch. This is really cool, as currently I spend 90% of my time fixing bugs, or adding features to a really old PHP 4 code base with register_globals ON.
So, now my question is.. do I use PHP 5 or 4 ? I think the answer to this is pretty simple, as I want to learn how to do things in PHP 5, but this app needs a database, and I am going to use MySQL. It’s already in beta, and by the time I’m done with my development (2-3 months), we may reach GA. So, what do you guys think ?

The app in question, is basically a Document Management System. We’re going to have Documents with Sections and Subsections, all of which will be converted well formed XML when deployed. The whole point of this app, is to prevent the “business” side manage the content of the documents, rather than us software engineers. Currently, the “business” makes changes to the XML document in MS …

As flawed as I think AJAX is, I just can’t help but want to start work on an AJAX project. It’s been my dream for a long time to make a 2D Zelda-style MMORPG (similar to Graal (but not the Graal 3D garbage.)) I’ve also always wanted to make a web/browser-based MMORPG (something like Runescape.) I don’t know Java though, and I don’t want to mess with shitty browser refreshes like phpRPG had (note that phpRPG is undergoing some big changes, so maybe they’ll come up with a better product this time around.) AJAX seems like the perfect means to achieve my end of a non-Java, browser-based MMORPG. phpRPG might actually be a good starting point since, well, it is an RPG written in PHP. The AJAX interaction would be the tough part. I would imagine motion in phpRPG is based on locations stored in …

Hello all.

I’m Jeff Lang. I work as a PHP web developer for a university I attend. I’ve been doing PHP work as well as some writing for a few years now. In my blog, I plan to focus more on the general aspects of PHP and how it’s used in the business and educational world rather than the technical side of things. A lot of technical information is already out there, so I plan to bring some fresh ideas and content to the world of PHP.

The first thing I want to touch upon is PHP in an educational setting. I feel much can be learned from PHP being taught in school; however, I would not recommend it for a first language. First, it is extremely common to couple MySQL with PHP. PHP can be taught stand-alone, but in the real world, the PHP-MySQL (or a similar database) combination is what is used in the majority of the cases. Students are forced not only to learn the mechanics of the PHP language, but they are also forced to learn the …