Solving the Unicode Puzzle

Is your web site multilingual? Many web sites cannotcorrectly interpret or display anything other than English languagecharacters. In this article, Michael Toppa will introduce you toUnicode, and describe the method he used to make his webapplications work, no matter what the language.—by Michael Toppa

The Anatomy of a Hit

It’s always useful to know just how many hits your sites aregetting. John Zaleski Ph. D. will show you how to capture web pageaccess statistics, and chart the results, to give a graphicalindication of your sites’ taffic, all with only a basic knowledgeog PHP and MySQL.—by John Zaleski

Advanced Sessions and Authentication in PHP 5

Native session support has been present in PHP since version4, but its lack of sophistication means it is often found wantingin enterprise-level development environments. In the second (andfinal) article in this series, author Ed Lecky-Thompson tacklessessions from the ground up; from recapping PHP’s built-insupport right through to the development of a sophisticated braceof classes, especially optimized for session handling andauthentication in PHP 5.—by Ed Lecky-Thompson

XML Pull

Despite the popularity of known APIs for XML processing, suchas SAX and DOM, the XMLPull parser is finding more and morefollowers. Author Markus Nix explains this relatively newtechnology by introducing you to one of PHP’s newest extensions,xmlReader.—by Markus Nix

Security Corner: Persistent Logins

Many sites implement a “Remember Me”, or Persistent Loginfeature. It comes in many variations, and attempts to implementthis feature are frequently the cause of security vulnerabilities.This month’s column attempts to provide some guidelines andsuggestions for adding a persistent login feature to your webapplications without compromising your security standards.—by Chris Shiflett

Test Pattern: The Never Ending Backlog

You probably dream of clearing your backlog. You would loveto experience the joy of declaring a project “done”rather than starting each day with a never ending “todo” list. Isn’t this what all that planning and projectmanagement was supposed to achieve after all? A controlled, fixedtarget and nice charts saying when we are going to finish, at leastthat was the promise. Well maybe the backlog isn’t going away? Justsuppose for a minute we embrace it. What does our project look likethen…?—by Marcus Baker