php[architect]

by Alexander Tarachanowicz II

Still stuck in the Dark Ages of the Web and using a text editor as your primary develop-ment tool? What's stopping you from taking that leap of faith and casting your trusty text editor aside for a full-scale IDE? Don't feel like dishing out big bucks or paying for up-grades? Luckily for you there is an open source alternative—PHPeclipse.

by Ruben Avila

The next generation of HTML forms represents new ways of thinking and creating on the web. Are you ready to wake up and smell the coffee or semantic form markup and multi-device ultra-portability? Join author Rubén Martínez Ávila in discovering XForms.

by Stefan Priebsch

Many widely used web applications such as bulletin boards and wikis, and of course a lot of Web sites, were created for PHP 4, and thus the code does not make much use of object-oriented concepts. Yet, object-oriented code is easier to maintain and extend. Does PHP 5 mean we will have to rewrite all that code from scratch? In this article, Stefan Priebsch will teach you how to introduce object-oriented programming concepts while refactoring existing procedural code.

by Joseph Kouyoumjian

Now you can build your own highly available, scalable platform for running mission-critical PHP applications on commonly available commodity hardware, using proven open source software. With no software license fees, you can add as many servers as you like to increase performance. This frees you from the need to buy the latest and fastest hardware. This article is the second of a three-part series by Joseph H. Kouyoumjian, showing you exactly how to build and configure just such a platform.

by Jeff Moore

Dependency injection is a simple pattern and philosophy that improves the reusability, testability and main-tainability of code. Discover the basics of this excellent technique with columnist Jeff Moore.

by Ilia Alshanetsky

A person’s identity is a precious thing; it defines who we are and ultimately makes each person unique. When it comes to the online world, the "identity" of a person is often nothing more than a short stream of bytes passed via URLs or Cookies, known as sessions. Last month, security expert Ilia Alshanetsky covered the basics of sessions and a few ways to protect your users' data. This month, join him in diving deeper into the dangers of session management.