php[architect]

by Daniel Kushner

Daniel Kushner, creator of the Zend PHP Certification program, and Director of eBusiness at Zend Technologies Inc., tells the story of how the program came about. In this piece, he explores the difficulties in developing the ZCE certification and raises a glass to its success: there are now more than 1000 Zend Certified Engineers, worldwide.

by Maarten Balliauw

Using FTP in PHP is simple: fopen() to a ftp:// host, and you are rolling. FTPS is possible too, if PHP is compiled with OpenSSL support. But have you ever connected to SFTP? A long search for possible solutions lead author Maarten Balliauw to create a fopen() stream wrapper for the SFTP protocol--find out how.

by Marco Tabini

The term "poka-yoke" is used to indicate a behaviour-shaping constraint-—that is, a device that places limits on the way in which a particular operation can be performed so that it minimizes the possibility of error at the source. PHP 5 introduces several new concepts that make it possible to apply this concept to input filtering and output escaping to finally implement an easy solution that fixes the developer, rather than the language. Publisher and frequent contributor Marco Tabini dives into his implementation of a poka-yoke filtering class.

by Derick Rethans

Porting a large application to PHP 5.1 is not an easy task, and can best be split up in multiple phases. In this article, PHP core contributor Derick Rethans explains architectural and technical solutions to problems that arose while porting and generalizing the library of such a large application. Because the library is also generalized, now, it has been made public as a separate project: the eZ components.

by Chris Shiflett

In this month's Security corner, columnist Chris Shiflett discusses character encoding, a topic that is sure to become increasingly important as web applications continue to attract a more diverse audience. The recent discovery of a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Google's web site has created an increased interest in this topic, primarily because a lack of character encoding consistency was the root cause of the problem.

by Marcus Baker

How should you develop software? There is a bewildering array of methodolgies to choose from. You can have Waterfall, RUP, eXtreme Programming, DSDM, Scrum, Spice, Crystal or even just roll your own. Not only are you confronted with a complicated choice, but adopting a particular system will have enormous impact on team culture and the business. This isn’t a decision to take lightly. How do we make a rational decision? Columnist Marcus Baker explains.