Tune Your Search Results With Ajax

Tired of your search engine returning irrelevant results?Want to offer your clients a search engine that not only allows forrelevance searching, but can also produce results before the formis even submitted? Using a combination of AJAX, CSS, PHP and MySQL,you can provide your customers with a useful tool that returnsresults with suggestive relevance, and authors Will Fitch and GregBlack will show you how.—by Will Fitch

Learning from Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails represents a major shift in the way modern Webapplications can be built. For PHP developers, there is much to belearned from the way that Rails became the Web applicationdevelopment framework all the cool kids are talking about. Discoverwhich tricks you can borrow from Rails with author ChrisHartjes.—by Chris Hartjes

Synchronizing the World

Using handheld PCs and cellphones to access the Internet isbecoming more and more common every day, so why are we stillsynchronizing our calendar and address book data over a USB cable?Wouldn’t it be nice to click on a button while connected tothe network wirelessly and be able to sync everything? In thisarticle, Sherman Lilly shows you how to do exactly that, using twoof the most powerful things to come to wireless devices on theInternet: PHP and SyncML.—by Sherman Lilly

Services made simple with PHP

You may already have come across the SDO extension in PECL.Here, authors Caroline Maynard, Graham Charters, Matthew Peters,Megan Beynon, and Simon Laws introduce its stablemate, SCA for PHP,and show how they work together to help you write reusablecomponents that can be called either locally, or remotely via Webservices, with an identical interface and with a minimum of fuss.SCA generates WSDL as needed from annotations within your PHPscript, and resolves dependencies between components at runtime.Deploying a Web service becomes just a matter of dropping a PHPscript into Apache.—by Caroline Maynard

Security Corner: Hacking with Google

Search engines have long been a favorite tool of hackers, whohave been using them to identify sites running old and vulnerablepieces of software, locate carelessly placed sensitive files and todo research for social engineering. The process has even beenpopularized by a number of books and an entire archive of“interesting queries” lies within the Google HackingDatabase (GHDB). But, with the introduction of Google’s codesearch, they can do much more. It is now possible to search forsignatures of vulnerable code and to confirm the exploit by seeingit in the context of the other application code, for truly nastyhacks. In a way, you could say that Google has just earned itself atop shelf in the hacker’s toolbox. In this article, IliaAlshanetsky examines why this is the case and shows what you as adeveloper can do to protect yourself.—by Ilia Alshanetsky

Callbacks and the observer pattern help produce modular,loosely coupled systems. Join columnist Jeff Moore as he continuescoverage of the Observer pattern.—by Jeff Moore