In its early days, the Internet was all about sharing static data like images, flat text files, and downloadable binaries. The early Internet’s static nature was useful in for sharing information. In many ways, the ability to tie static web pages to the dynamic content resident in enterprise databases allowed us to build new kinds of applications. This is where, in many respects, PHP shines.

Among the easiest ways to ensure your website or web application is behaving security is to subject it to objective, third-party security scans. The Mozilla Observatory is one such tool that helps ensure strong security for any system operating on the public Internet. The Observatory automatically scans your website to make sure you correctly configure […]

How might we keep the next PHP project from evolving into the dreaded Big Ball of Mud? This month we’ll explore and build a possible foundational structure, a “composite.” Then, having built out this structure, we’ll realize that we might still be over-engineering things a bit—but this structure remains a necessary step along the way.

Last month we covered Windows Subsystem for Linux and this month we’re continuing the journey by demonstrating how to further work with our WSL distribution using tools such as Mailhog, Xdebug with PhpStorm and Visual Studio Code, and ngrok.

Broadly speaking, autoloading is a mechanism for the loading code into your program on demand. If you look at a single request in your application, chances are it needs a different set of classes than another request. Where a “Login” action may use a controller, database class, and an authentication layer, a “Logout” action may […]

PHP has many native ways to serialize objects, but not all of them are created equal. PHP 7.4 introduces what is hopefully the “one final way that will work this time.” Even so, the others aren’t going away any time soon.

The shift towards API driven design has brought in all-new design patterns from traditional Model-View-Controller (MVC). Middleware pipelines are geared to address the complexities and nuances that arise with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This article delves into popular frameworks, discusses strategies for adding layers, handling authentication and authorization, and implications for projects. Learn all about […]

By Chris Tankersley There is a huge emphasis put on the code maintainability, and for a good reason. The programming industry is rife with what we like to term “legacy code,” which boils down to code that solves a business problem, but we, as the current maintainers, do not understand. No language is safe from […]

By Chris Tankersley When facing a challenging problem, you want a flexible codebase that adapts quickly. Object-oriented programming facilitates it by giving you the power through inheritance, encapsulating code in reusable objects, and generally making them work for your application as you see fit. However, we can find flexibility in other programming approaches. Languages such […]

By Eli White While much of the world shuts down, the PHP core developers have been hard at work preparing for the release of PHP 8.0 at the end of this year! The feature freeze is in just a few months (July 28th), so this is the exciting time when there is a push to […]