php[architect]

by Mikael Johansson

Ever had to rewrite an application to take advantage of your client's new authentication scheme, or wished dearly that the service you're installing had Kerberos support? PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) is a collection of libraries that handle the authentication tasks of applications, allowing them to stay completely independent of the underlying authentication scheme. This article, from PHP's PAM contributor, Mikael  Johansson, introduces PAM, touches briefly on how to configure it, and explains how to interact with it from within PHP.

by Jonathan Stark

FileMaker is a popular and powerful desktop database application toolkit. FileMaker, Inc. recently released a beta version of the FileMaker API for PHP, which allows PHP to more easily talk to the FileMaker Server Advanced product. Last month, author Jonathan Stark introduced some of the concepts behind the newly hatched API. In the concluding episode of this two-part series, he explains how FileMaker makes editing your database records a snap.

by Alessandro Rosa

Meet MySQL Babel. The project, by author Alessandro Rosa, currently at prototype stage, aims to open up PHP applications to user-defined database interrogation by translating native language sentences into SQL queries. The intended audience for this article is intermediate to advanced level programmers and advanced database front-end users who might be interested in helping develop the Babel project, and ultimately in using it.

by Dirk Merkel

The Active Record design pattern provides an objected oriented wrapper around database access. In this article, Dirk Merkel explains how he learned from existing Active Record implementations and found himself creating a powerful tool for use in PHP/MySQL application development.

by Ilia Alshanetsky

A few weeks ago, columnist and PHP Release Manager Ilia Alshanetsky rolled PHP 5.2.1—the latest word in PHP development. The 5.2.1 release is unusual in its focus on security—and, in particular, in the number of security issues it addresses. This is an overview of the security fixes and enhancements found in PHP 5.2.1.

by Jeff Moore

Ease of deployment is one of the biggest advantages of Web applications over desktop applications, but that doesn't mean it's foolproof. This month, Jeff Moore takes a tour around some of the pitfalls of application deployment and casts an eye over the PEAR installer's response to them.