PHP Phone Home

With email becoming less and less reliable, and telephony more and more pervasive, perhaps it’s time to consider finding a new medium to supplement the functionality of our Web applications? In this piece, php|architect Editor-in-Chief, SeanC oates investigates the potential of Asterisk in terms of PHPscripting.—by Sean Coates

Sprinkling a Little Ajax

Everybody’s talking about Ajax, but it’s a mystifying kind of a thing when you first look into it.Here’s an account of author Ron Goff’s Aja awakening, with an entry-level introduction to using this weird and wonderful new Web technology alongside PHP 4.—by Ron Goff

XML With Style

XML has become ubiquitous. It can be found in configuration files, in Web services, in documentation, and more. One of the most convenient ways to convert XML documents into more usable format is through the Extensible Style Language. If you find displaying or converting information stored in XML unnecessarily complicated, XSL is probably the solution you’ve been looking for, and author Theo Spears will show you how to get started.—by Theo Spears

Relevant search results with Ajax

Tired of your search engine returning irrelevant results?Want to offer your client a search engine that not only allows for relevance searching, but can also produce results before the form is even submitted? Authors Will Fitch and Greg Black show you how to use a combination of Ajax, CSS, PHP and MySQL, to provide your customer with a useful tool that returns results with suggestive relevance.—by Will Fitch

Security Corner: Security Testing

In this month’s Security Corner, the topic is security testing. Security expert Chris Shiflett discusses a few techniques that you can use to test the security of your Web applications. As with other types of testing, security testing is best performed early and often, and this is easiest to manage if it is part of your standard development process. Every application is unique, but this article can get you started toward developing your own testing strategy.—by Chris Shiflett

Test Pattern: Exceptional PHP

This month, in Test Pattern, columnist Jeff Moore graces us with an overview of how to handle and propagate error conditions and exceptions in PHP.—by Jeff Moore