php[architect]

by Eric David Benari

The path to PHP righteousness can turn a mere mortal into a coding luminary. Producing code of distinct excellence benefits everyone; the site-owner will get a better product, the hands-on managers will have a clearer understanding of the project state, and fellow developers will be elated that they can quickly and easily comprehend your code. So read on, follow the ten golden rules, and pave the way for others to see the light.

by Bart McLeod

Following the Dutch PHP Conference in 2007, which had a strong emphasis on frameworks, author Bart MacLeod felt it was time he learned more about them. He decided to take a deep breath, throw most of his own 'framework' away and adapt his legacy code to a third party one. Knowing all too well that parting from your own cherished code and choosing a framework is not easy, he decided to keep a diary of his struggles and share it with you.

by Dirk Merkel

Let's face it, we all make mistakes. As programmers, our mistakes usually run the gamut from syntax errors to, if we're unlucky, accidentally deleting important data or compromising secure systems. However, by planning ahead and coding defensively, we can avoid many of the pitfalls and greatly increase the quality of our code.

by Zoe Slattery and Anthony Phillips

The vast majority of the RESTful service implementations you will have come across are simply designed to read data. In this article, Zoe and Anthony show you how to go a step beyond this and build a simple shopping cart service using REST principles.

by Steph Fox

PHP is full of funny little quirks—and the upcoming migration to PHP 5 is going to make many of us painfully aware of them.

by Matt Zandstra

XDebug and KCachegrind offer a powerful combination of profiling and debugging tools for PHP code, but not everyone can use them. In this month's column, author Matt Zandstra takes a look at the options available to the programmer who only has PHP itself to work with.

by Stefan Esser

In the final Security Corner column, PHP security expert Stefan Esser describes some differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5 that can lead to security holes when code that was safe to use in PHP 4 is run on PHP 5 servers.

by Marco Tabini

Date manipulation is one of the least pleasant aspects of business software development—and, apparently, one that many people don't quite bother to understand in real life, either.