Planet PHP

78. PHP certification: is it worth it?

Posted on: 2008-05-27

This post focus on the question of whether it is useful for PHP developers to obtain a certification.

Maurício Garcia is a reputed PHP professional from Brazil that gives presentations about Zend PHP certification that help people to decide whether is it really worth taking the exam and how to get prepared to take it.

Maurício has given an interview that answers many questions that may help PHP developers decide whether it is worth obtain the PHP Zend certification and to prepare yourself to pass the exam. The complete interview is published in this article.

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77. Google App Engine needs PHP support

Posted on: 2008-04-11

Google App Engine was launched but it does not support PHP. This article presents some ideas that can help Google adding PHP support sooner rather than later.

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76. Top 10 tips to get better PHP jobs

Posted on: 2008-03-31

This article presents top tips that may help you getting better PHP jobs.

Also related with the quest of getting better PHP jobs, the PHPClasses site is launching a new search engine with the goal to help employers finding PHP professionals by skill.

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74. A PHP killer feature - Streams abstraction

Posted on: 2008-01-31

This article explains what are stream handlers and how they simplify PHP developers lives by allowing PHP applications to easily read and write data from containers, like remote Web pages or e-mail messages, as if they were files.

A real world example is presented to demonstrate how you can access messages in a POP3 mailbox and how it can be used to automatically process messages from the site users requesting support.

The article also presents more examples of cool stream handlers classes submitted to the PHPClasses site by several authors.

Unrelated to this topic, the PHPClasses site is announcing the availability of a Twitter activity stream that may be used to keep track in a single place of the submissions like: the latest classes, reviews, blog posts and trackbacks.

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69. 13 rules to optimize your Web site performance

Posted on: 2007-08-31

Everybody wants to squeeze as much performance of their Web applications as possible. Usually this requires skilled professionals to achieve. Fortunately, several performance evaluation tools are now available to make Web site performance tuning a much easier task.

This post discusses tools like YSlow and other techniques to tune your Web servers performance, as well the results of using such tools and techniques in a busy site like PHPClasses.

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67. PHP security exploit with GIF images

Posted on: 2007-06-20

This post talks about a PHP security exploit that can be performed using specially crafted GIF images that embed malicious PHP code. Advice is given on what to do and to not do to avoid the problem.

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66. More defensive programming practices to survive Web site traffic peaks

Posted on: 2007-05-29

This is a follow-up of last months post about defensive programming practices. This time the article focus on practices to survive Web site traffic peaks, just like what happened to the PHPClasses site last month when the previous post was approved to Digg's front page.

This article also announces a new Web hosting comparison service available to the PHPClasses site users.

The participation of Borland/Codegear as sponsor of the PHP Programming Innovation Award is also covered on this article.

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65. 8 defensive programming best practices to prevent breaking your sites

Posted on: 2007-04-25

This article describes software development practices that have been used to prevent problems that can break Web sites.

This message also explains recent changes that were made to the site newsletter user options to reduce the site bandwidth usage to keep the hosting costs on budget.

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61. File upload progress meter for PHP 4, at last!

Posted on: 2006-12-21

This post explains how to implement a upload progress meter for PHP sites, including those that still run PHP 4.

It also explains how to use a new plug-in of the Form Generation and Validation class to show an upload progress bar and live upload statistics using AJAX COMET requests.

The Forms Generation and Validation class is very important to the PHPClasses site since its beginning. This post tells about the story of the site and how this class motivated its creation.

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58. Responsive AJAX applications with COMET

Posted on: 2006-09-27

This post describes an approach used to implement highly responsive AJAX applications using the COMET approach.

It describes in detail how the AJAX COMET approach can be implemented in PHP.

It also discusses how HTTP compression and chunking affect AJAX response delays, as well aspects that may influence the choice between Apache 1.3.x with mod_gzip versus Apache 2.x with mod_deflate for AJAX COMET applications.

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