—by Chris Hartjes

Long Live the Code

Companies of all sizes use PHP widely today. As the PHPcodebase grows, maintaining existing code becomes an increasinglyimportant part of a developer’s work. Along the way, majorPHP updates like PHP 6 and reusable components like PEAR, eZcomponents, and the Zend Framework are shaping up. Author StefanPriebsch explains how you can avoid rewriting your code fromscratch and still benefit from these new improvements.—by Stefan Priebsch

Frameworks: What's the Big Deal?

Prado, Ruby on Rails, .NET, Struts, CakePHP, Zope, Cocoa,Turbine, Drupal, J2EE, the Zend PHP Framework… it seems thedevelopment world is just crazy about frameworks these days. What’sthe big deal? Why is it that web development seems to be movingtoward frameworks? Find out in this piece by DarrylPatterson.—by Darryl Patterson

Test Pattern: Organizing for Change

Change is a fact of life in software development. Newcolumnist Jeff Moore explains how we can apply some of the sameprinciples we used to organize our physical work areas towardorganizing our software to adapt to change.—by Jeff Moore

Security Corner: Cross-Site Request Forgery in Action

Of all the modern attacks aimed at the visitor of a website,cross-site request forgery (CSRF) is one of the most interesting,since it allows exploitation without the actual hacking of thewebsite. Security expert Ilia Alshanetsky explains how CSRF uses aseemingly benign web feature to trick and confuse the user intoperforming the tasks desired by the hacker.—by Ilia Alshanetsky