php[architect]

by Will Fitch

Tired of your search engine returning irrelevant results? Want to offer your clients a search engine that not only allows for relevance searching, but can also produce results before the form is even submitted? Using a combination of AJAX, CSS, PHP and MySQL, you can provide your customers with a useful tool that returns results with suggestive relevance, and authors Will Fitch and Greg Black will show you how.

by Chris Hartjes

Ruby on Rails represents a major shift in the way modern Web applications can be built. For PHP developers, there is much to be learned from the way that Rails became the Web application development framework all the cool kids are talking about. Discover which tricks you can borrow from Rails with author Chris Hartjes.

by Sherman Lilly

Using handheld PCs and cellphones to access the Internet is becoming more and more common every day, so why are we still synchronizing our calendar and address book data over a USB cable? Wouldn’t it be nice to click on a button while connected to the network wirelessly and be able to sync everything? In this article, Sherman Lilly shows you how to do exactly that, using two of the most powerful things to come to wireless devices on the Internet: PHP and SyncML.

by Caroline Maynard

You may already have come across the SDO extension in PECL. Here, authors Caroline Maynard, Graham Charters, Matthew Peters, Megan Beynon, and Simon Laws introduce its stablemate, SCA for PHP, and show how they work together to help you write reusable components that can be called either locally, or remotely via Web services, with an identical interface and with a minimum of fuss. SCA generates WSDL as needed from annotations within your PHP script, and resolves dependencies between components at runtime. Deploying a Web service becomes just a matter of dropping a PHP script into Apache.

by Ilia Alshanetsky

Search engines have long been a favorite tool of hackers, who have been using them to identify sites running old and vulnerable pieces of software, locate carelessly placed sensitive files and to do research for social engineering. The process has even been popularized by a number of books and an entire archive of “interesting queries” lies within the Google Hacking Database (GHDB). But, with the introduction of Google’s code search, they can do much more. It is now possible to search for signatures of vulnerable code and to confirm the exploit by seeing it in the context of the other application code, for truly nasty hacks. In a way, you could say that Google has just earned itself a top shelf in the hacker’s toolbox. In this article, Ilia Alshanetsky examines why this is the case and shows what you as a developer can do to protect yourself.

by Jeff Moore

Callbacks and the observer pattern help produce modular, loosely coupled systems. Join columnist Jeff Moore as he continues coverage of the Observer pattern.