The Ten Commandments of Coding Excellence

The path to PHP righteousness can turn a mere mortal into acoding luminary. Producing code of distinct excellence benefitseveryone; the site-owner will get a better product, the hands-onmanagers will have a clearer understanding of the project state,and fellow developers will be elated that they can quickly andeasily comprehend your code. So read on, follow the ten goldenrules, and pave the way for others to see the light.—by Eric David Benari

A Refactoring Diary, Part II: symfony

Following the Dutch PHP Conference in 2007, which had astrong emphasis on frameworks, author Bart MacLeod felt it was timehe learned more about them. He decided to take a deep breath, throwmost of his own ‘framework’ away and adapt his legacy code to athird party one. Knowing all too well that parting from your owncherished code and choosing a framework is not easy, he decided tokeep a diary of his struggles and share it with you.—by Bart McLeod

Exceptional Error Handling

Let’s face it, we all make mistakes. As programmers, ourmistakes usually run the gamut from syntax errors to, if we’reunlucky, accidentally deleting important data or compromisingsecure systems. However, by planning ahead and coding defensively,we can avoid many of the pitfalls and greatly increase the qualityof our code.—by Dirk Merkel

REST and PHP—Back to the Shopping Cart

The vast majority of the RESTful service implementations youwill have come across are simply designed to read data. In thisarticle, Zoe and Anthony show you how to go a step beyond this andbuild a simple shopping cart service using REST principles.—by Zoe Slattery and Anthony Phillips

Editorial: Strings and Pulleys

PHP is full of funny little quirks—and theupcoming migration to PHP 5 is going to make many of us painfullyaware of them.—by Steph Fox

Test Pattern: Poor Person's Profiling

XDebug and KCachegrind offer a powerful combination ofprofiling and debugging tools for PHP code, but not everyone canuse them. In this month’s column, author Matt Zandstra takes a lookat the options available to the programmer who only has PHP itselfto work with.—by Matt Zandstra

Security Corner: Security Aspects of Migration from PHP 4

In the final Security Corner column, PHP security expertStefan Esser describes some differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5that can lead to security holes when code that was safe to use inPHP 4 is run on PHP 5 servers.—by Stefan Esser

exit(0): Bad Dates

Date manipulation is one of the least pleasant aspects ofbusiness software development—and, apparently,one that many people don’t quite bother to understand in real life,either.—by Marco Tabini