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Web applications aren't very adept at recognizing suspicious behaviour on the part of their users. Unless, that is, we make our applications react a little more like people.
Parameter passing is an API design fundamental. Most of us are turned off by overly long function signatures, but what about the role of enumerated values and flags? In this month's Test Pattern, I'll take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly in parameter design.
There's something compelling about a plugin. Just check out the plugin repositories for your favourite open source blog software or media player. How about taking things a stage further though? How about making the heart of your application extensible? Did I hear you say the whole of your application? No problem
PHP may have been designed for the Web, but it has a few other, less well-known talents hidden up its sleeve. Whoever would have thought you could use PHP for systems administration tasks? For everyone out there doing daily battle with Windows networks and C++ scripts, here's a modest solution.
There is a myth that PHP 4 and PHP 5 are not useful for working with non-European languages. The mbstring extension can dispel that myth; it offers support for any language supported by Unicode. In this, the second of a two-part series, I will introduce "the devil's tongue" (as a frustrated missionary once termed it) and show you how you can use good old PHP 4 to achieve complex string manipulation with Japanese.
Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued. (PHP.net, 13 July 2007)