Application Development with PHP-GTK 2

Long recognized as the best scripting language for the Web,PHP has moved beyond the Web and onto the desktop with theemergence of the PHP-GTK extension. The second generation, PHP-GTK2, brings the power of PHP 5’s object model together with therich widget set of GTK+ 2.6, enabling PHP developers to make fullyfledged, cross-platform desktop applications. Join author andproject contributor Anant Narayanan in discovering PHP-GTK.—by Anant Narayanan

Validating Forms with Randomly Generated Images

With hackers and spammers getting so clever at writingscripts that take advantage of web site forms, it’s fastbecoming essential to ensure that the user accessing your web siteis a human being and not some hacker’s script. Usingvalidation images that require human interaction is one way toprotect your site, and Eric Angel shows you how.—by Eric Angel

PHP Clustering on Linux

Now you can build your own highly available, scalableplatform for running mission-critical PHP applications on commonlyavailable commodity hardware, using proven open source software.With no software license fees, you can add as many servers as youlike to increase performance. This frees you from the need to buythe latest and fastest hardware. This is the final article in athree-part series, where Joseph Koujoumjian shows you exactly howto build and configure just such a platform.—by Joseph Kouyoumjian

Long Live the Code

As PHP 5 is used more and more in production, the PHP codebase is becoming increasingly object-oriented. Even so, we neverseem to get the design of our software right the first time.Instead of rewriting our applica-tion from scratch, we can changethe design of existing code through refactoring. Refactoring makesthe code more readable, maintainable, and easier to extend. In thisarticle–the third and final article in this series by StefanPriebsch–you will learn why refactoring works par-ticularly wellon object-oriented code.—by Stefan Priebsch

Security Corner: Understanding Superglobals

This month’s Security Corner covers the topic of PHP’ssuperglobals, and it’s partly-inspired by a discussion that tookplace on the PHP mailing list. In this article, security expertChris Shiflett hopes to correct some misunderstandings about thesuperglobals as well as highlight a few common securitypitfalls.—by Chris Shiflett

Test Pattern: The Art of Being Lazy

Lazy loading is a performance pattern where we put off doingan operation in the hopes of never having to do it at all. Explorethis technique with columnist Jeff Moore–it can help withperformance, by reducing the memory footprint and CPU cycles usedto load code that is never needed.—by Jeff Moore