The Making of One Thousand Zend Certified Engineers

Daniel Kushner, creator of the Zend PHP Certificationprogram, and Director of eBusiness at Zend Technologies Inc., tellsthe story of how the program came about. In this piece, he exploresthe difficulties in developing the ZCE certification and raises aglass to its success: there are now more than 1000 Zend CertifiedEngineers, worldwide.
—by Daniel Kushner

SFTP in PHP

Using FTP in PHP is simple: fopen() to a ftp:// host, and youare rolling. FTPS is possible too, if PHP is compiled with OpenSSLsupport. But have you ever connected to SFTP? A long search forpossible solutions lead author Maarten Balliauw to create a fopen()stream wrapper for the SFTP protocol–find out how.—by Maarten Balliauw

Doing It Japanese Style

The term “poka-yoke” is used to indicate a behaviour-shapingconstraint-—that is, a device that places limits on the wayin which a particular operation can be performed so that itminimizes the possibility of error at the source. PHP 5 introducesseveral new concepts that make it possible to apply this concept toinput filtering and output escaping to finally implement an easysolution that fixes the developer, rather than the language.Publisher and frequent contributor Marco Tabini dives into hisimplementation of a poka-yoke filtering class.—by Marco Tabini

eZ components

Porting a large application to PHP 5.1 is not an easy task,and can best be split up in multiple phases. In this article, PHPcore contributor Derick Rethans explains architectural andtechnical solutions to problems that arose while porting andgeneralizing the library of such a large application. Because thelibrary is also generalized, now, it has been made public as aseparate project: the eZ components.—by Derick Rethans

Security Corner: Character Encoding

In this month’s Security corner, columnist Chris Shiflettdiscusses character encoding, a topic that is sure to becomeincreasingly important as web applications continue to attract amore diverse audience. The recent discovery of a cross-sitescripting (XSS) vulnerability in Google’s web site has created anincreased interest in this topic, primarily because a lack ofcharacter encoding consistency was the root cause of theproblem.—by Chris Shiflett

Test Pattern: How Do I Develop?

How should you develop software? There is a bewildering arrayof methodolgies to choose from. You can have Waterfall, RUP,eXtreme Programming, DSDM, Scrum, Spice, Crystal or even just rollyour own. Not only are you confronted with a complicated choice,but adopting a particular system will have enormous impact on teamculture and the business. This isn’t a decision to takelightly. How do we make a rational decision? Columnist Marcus Bakerexplains.—by Marcus Baker