The Total Eclipse of PHP Development

Still stuck in the Dark Ages of the Web and using a texteditor as your primary develop-ment tool? What’s stopping you fromtaking that leap of faith and casting your trusty text editor asidefor a full-scale IDE? Don’t feel like dishing out big bucks orpaying for up-grades? Luckily for you there is an open sourcealternative—PHPeclipse.—by Alexander Tarachanowicz II

PHP and XForms

The next generation of HTML forms represents new ways ofthinking and creating on the web. Are you ready to wake up andsmell the coffee or semantic form markup and multi-deviceultra-portability? Join author Rubén Martínez Ávilain discovering XForms.—by Ruben Avila

Long Live the Code

Many widely used web applications such as bulletin boards andwikis, and of course a lot of Web sites, were created for PHP 4,and thus the code does not make much use of object-orientedconcepts. Yet, object-oriented code is easier to maintain andextend. Does PHP 5 mean we will have to rewrite all that code fromscratch? In this article, Stefan Priebsch will teach you how tointroduce object-oriented programming concepts while refactoringexisting procedural code.—by Stefan Priebsch

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 article is the second of athree-part series by Joseph H. Kouyoumjian, showing you exactly howto build and configure just such a platform.—by Joseph Kouyoumjian

Test Pattern: Dependency Injection

Dependency injection is a simple pattern and philosophy thatimproves the reusability, testability and main-tainability of code.Discover the basics of this excellent technique with columnist JeffMoore.—by Jeff Moore

Security Corner: All Your Session Are Still Belong to Us

A person’s identity is a precious thing;it defines who we are and ultimately makes each person unique. Whenit comes to the online world, the “identity” of a person is oftennothing more than a short stream of bytes passed via URLs orCookies, known as sessions. Last month, security expert IliaAlshanetsky covered the basics of sessions and a few ways toprotect your users’ data. This month, join him in diving deeperinto the dangers of session management.—by Ilia Alshanetsky