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I firmly believe that the biggest obstacle to PHP becoming widely accepted in the Enterprise is not a lack of useful features, obscure faults within the PHP4 parser, or any other esoteric technical detail. One of the main reasons PHP projects get a bad repuation is that often PHP projects do not employ good coding standards to ensure the source code ...

This article will define two-way key cryptography and explain how it differs from other well known PHP functions, like md5 and rot13, and when it is appropriate to use one-way hashing or two-way encryption. Then we will step through installing mcrypt as a dynamically loadable extension. We will explore two applications: encrypting cookies, and encrypting database information (such as credit card ...

Welcome to the first edition of Guru Speak, a new column that I'll be bringing to you every other month right here in PHP Magazine. The topics that I'll be writing about will vary, but one recurring topic that I want to focus on is that of providing thorough answers to frequently asked questions. This is a topic that is appropriate ...

This article aims to clearly answer seven of the most common questions asked by PHP users about MySQL's licensing. For each question, this article attempts to provide a simple and direct answer that focuses on the intent of the question, rather than its literal meaning. Additionally, for each question and answer, there is also a more detailed and technical supporting discussion. ...

A login box is a couple of text fields and a button. A ten-minute job, right? Well, coding the first version probably is, but does it work? Easy - fire up the browser, enter a username and password and click Submit - Success!! Really? Did it set the cookie or was it set from my last test? OK, try again. Clear ...

The cover of Issue 05.04 has been generated using K++. This will be the first time that the cover art will be provided by a computer (though a human will still handle the layout). ...

PHP 5 is a very popular point for discussion within the PHP community. With the third Release Candidate released on the 8th of June and the Zend PHP 5 Coding Contest, it is easy to see that the full stable release of PHP 5 is just around the corner. At this very late stage of development, I managed to obtain ...

When an aircraft or a person goes missing in Ontario, Canada, volunteers from the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association (CASARA) Ontario spring into action. Now, with the implementation of Search and Rescue Command System (SARCS), developed with PHP, rescue teams are connected together in real time. This concept allows searches to be conducted with greater efficiency and safety. The power ...

Two solid months of tilling the proverbial soil, committing over 500 bits of fertilizer and squishing 90 documented bugs -- and countless undocumented ones -- has brought PEAR's most popular package to a new state of maturity. It is stable and fully tested on most of the supported DBMS's. The new release focuses on portability, allowing you to write applications that ...

This is the story of the PHPCommunity.org project's beginnings. Many lessons have been learned (some the hard way), and the project has already been a big success (without a single line of code being written). How did it happen? To truly understand the answer, I think it is important to describe the motivation behind the project. ...

This article focuses on a rather difficult topic - understanding the performance characteristics of PHP. It is difficult, not because PHP is complex, but because PHP's performance depends on many outside factors such as software versions, available hardware, operating system settings, and network configuration. ...

Nearly every PHP application uses sessions. This article takes a detailed look at implementing a secure session management mechanism with PHP. Following a fundamental introduction to the Web's underlying architecture, the challenge of maintaining state, and the basic operation and intent of cookies, I will step you through some simple and effective methods that can be used to increase the security ...

Every Web developer needs a few key skills: processing forms, querying databases, and parsing XML. While PHP makes it easy to solve the first two tasks, its XML support has been uneven. With PHP 5, this deficiency with first-rate XML utilities has been remedied.Of the many new XML features, this piece covers the DOM extension because it's the largest and most ...

Sometimes Web applications need to be extremely fast. At that point, everything matters - including every quote and every line that could consume a little too much, and every database query that will take up too much execution time. In this article we're going to focus on practices that will improve the performance of your Web application, and tools that can ...

Developers of modular PHP applications need to maintain the components of their software across release cycles. A solution would be to use the PEAR package manager for this task. Unfortunately, it can deal with packages only and not install, upgrade, or uninstall applications in total. With the ZZ/OSS Installer, both can be done. Developers have access to a PEAR-like packaging system ...

Whilst PHP is not the best tool for creating daemons, it does come fully loaded with the ability to fork, share memory, manage child processes etc. through the PCNTL, POSIX, Socket, SHMOP and System V Semaphore (sysvsem) extensions. ...

Along the way we will perform some statistical analysis of our data, showing how some PEAR packages (such as PEAR::Math_Statsand PEAR::Math_Histogram) can do the heavy lifting for us, so we can concentrate on the interpretation.We will also see an example of the misapplication of statistics as a cautionary tale for the unwary. ...

HMAC is similar in concept to systems such as PGP/GPG, except there is only one key, rather than a key pair. HMAC is used for message integrity checks between two parties who share a secret key. In this article, I put this to use within a website login scenario. ...

Whenever we develop a commercial or open-source application, we want to be sure that it will work on as many platforms as possible with little work. Whilst a one size fits all solution is not always possible, a little knowledge, some foresight, and a little bit of planning can go a long way. ...

PHP becomes more popular as a programming language every day. PHP has different modules for performing all kind of things. Two of these modules allow the user to use System V semaphores and shared memory. ...