php[architect]

by Anant Narayanan

Long recognized as the best scripting language for the Web, PHP has moved beyond the Web and onto the desktop with the emergence of the PHP-GTK extension. The second generation, PHP-GTK 2, brings the power of PHP 5’s object model together with the rich widget set of GTK+ 2.6, enabling PHP developers to make fully fledged, cross-platform desktop applications. Join author and project contributor Anant Narayanan in discovering PHP-GTK.

by Eric Angel

With hackers and spammers getting so clever at writing scripts that take advantage of web site forms, it’s fast becoming essential to ensure that the user accessing your web site is a human being and not some hacker’s script. Using validation images that require human interaction is one way to protect your site, and Eric Angel shows you how.

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 is the final article in a three-part series, where Joseph Koujoumjian shows you exactly how to build and configure just such a platform.

by Stefan Priebsch

As PHP 5 is used more and more in production, the PHP code base is becoming increasingly object-oriented. Even so, we never seem to get the design of our software right the first time. Instead of rewriting our applica-tion from scratch, we can change the design of existing code through refactoring. Refactoring makes the code more readable, maintainable, and easier to extend. In this article--the third and final article in this series by Stefan Priebsch--you will learn why refactoring works par-ticularly well on object-oriented code.

by Chris Shiflett

This month's Security Corner covers the topic of PHP's superglobals, and it's partly-inspired by a discussion that took place on the PHP mailing list. In this article, security expert Chris Shiflett hopes to correct some misunderstandings about the superglobals as well as highlight a few common security pitfalls.

by Jeff Moore

Lazy loading is a performance pattern where we put off doing an operation in the hopes of never having to do it at all. Explore this technique with columnist Jeff Moore--it can help with performance, by reducing the memory footprint and CPU cycles used to load code that is never needed.