Martin Rusev is developing a new database query library for PHP 5. The project shows promise, but it has some distance to go before it competes with other available libraries.

Early last month, we sent out an email to customers of php|architect announcing a contest just for them. Participants had to look at last month’s cover and name the 9 websites represented on the visible cards. We want to thank everyone who played, we loved reading some of the responses we got and wish that there had been a prize for most inventive answer. 🙂

After playing with Flex off and on for a couple of months, I decided I would try to break it. I’m not a security guy at heart, but I’ve listened closely and improved my own stuff, so I quickly came up with four ways that I might be able to cause problems with Flex. Here are my results with each. To be clear, it is not my goal to be a nefarious troublemaker and break everything. My goal is to find out where things could break.

July 22 has seen the release of two new versions of PHP – the innovator 5.3.x and the previous 5.2.x. There are interesting news for both these new releases.

Object-relational mappers are seen either as an abomination or as a life-saving tool. In the PHP world, they have appeared only in the last years.

PHPDOCX is a PHP library that allows its client code to generate Microsoft Word documents in the .docx format from PHP scripts, or to output PDF and HTML from a given Word document.

Ext4Yii is one of the numerous solution to bring a JavaScript framework into a PHP one with ease.

ModSecurity Handbook:The Complete Guide to the Popular Open Source Web Application Firewall by Ivan Ristic. What is ModSecurity in the first place? Why does it matter to you? What makes this book important to the practice of web application design?

How many times have we heard about security issues in PHP applications stemming from unescaped GET and POST parameters? Proper escaping of input is a perennial problem with web development in general, and for whatever reason PHP seems to have had more than its fair share of bad publicity on this front.

Ralph Schindler has started the ball rolling on requirements for Zend Db for Zend Framework 2.0.  He announced on the ZF Contributors mailing list:   Requirements have been solicited from both community members in various conversations, as well as looking through the issue tracker for feature requests that have been on the backlog due to […]