PHP offers a convenience superglobal called $_REQUEST that coalesces input from a number of sources into one easy to use array. A common thought amongst PHP developers is that you should avoid the use of $_REQUEST — but do you actually know why? Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve compiled a list of 8 features that are inherent to all badly designed software. This list is in regards to code design — it’s about architecture. Read the rest of this entry »
A friend of mine who is rather new to PHP was getting super confused about timestamps and timezones. So I thought I’d post a quick thought about timestamps today to clear up some confusion. Read the rest of this entry »
Today I want to talk about best practices in regards to reading user input. And if you haven’t already, I’m going to convince you why using PHP’s superglobal arrays are bad. Read the rest of this entry »
Just a quick post today around the topic of scalability. This is really a broad topic, but I wanted to give sortof a “starting point” or overview of how to create very scalable websites. The newest of my projects requires the system to scale infinitely, so I had to do a lot of research. I found enough articles on the subject but I never really found a checklist of sorts that pointed me in the right direction, everything was so open-ended. Read the rest of this entry »
If you talk to me regularly then you already know how much I love stream wrappers in PHP. The other day I was positively giddy with how easy it was to solve a particular problem by using stream wrappers. Read the rest of this entry »
Now that I’ve already covered what Unicode is in another post, it’s time to talk about actually using it. Today I’ll talk about how to create PHP applications that correctly handle Unicode. Read the rest of this entry »
I have a lot of developer friends who are still confused about the idea of character sets. The internet is a global phenomena; in today’s world, every developer must understand character sets if they are to create applications that work around the world. Read the rest of this entry »
A few days ago I went and registered the domain dashto.cc and created a really quick-n-dirty URL shortening site. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the first books to be published on the topic of Zend Framework was php|architect’s Guide to Programming with Zend Framework (Amazon). If you’re looking for an “in” into ZF then — eh, well, skip this book. Read the rest of this entry »