You’re a front-end developer tasked with constructing a new, complex website. You’re a stickler for web standards and explain to the developers on your team that they must commit only strict, accessible, semantic XHTML. Despite your instructions, your team still breaks the rules. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with a bit of understanding, these errors are correctable. In this article, we’ll explore why web standards and accessibility are worth fighting for, as well as some Vork Enterprise helper functions that can aid in keeping your source code free of niggling errors. –by Andrew Hoffman

Offline data access is the Achilles’ Heel of the cloud. What happens when the power’s out? Or the service is down? Scary stuff if you don’t have the ability to synchronize your data locally, easily–and stay in sync. CouchDB offers a powerful replication system that allows you to move not only your data, but complete web apps to your local machine to keep things running smoothly. We’ll discuss the importance of replication, create a CouchApp to demonstrate it, and use PHP to keep the replication running smoothly. –by Benjamin Young

There are times when MySQL, or another RDBMS, cannot perform under certain circumstances, such as high volumes of reads and writes. While there are many other data store options, there is an excellent candidate when raw speed is a must. This article will describe when Redis might be a great fit for your application. –by Justin Carmony

With jQuery talking to a Zend_Json_Server powered backend, you will be able to retrieve results from a web service, straight from your JavaScript code. Let’s try to create a simple monitoring dashboard to showcase JSON-RPC, a protocol using remote procedure calls much like XML-RPC did, way back. –by Jonas Mariën

In the past, Microsoft hasn’t exactly had a spotless reputation in the minds of developers; in fact, at times it has been downright horrible. In recent years though, Microsoft has been working hard to change that. Have they succeeded? Has Microsoft become one of the best friends the PHP development community has? –by Cal Evans

The short description of this month’s issue, ZF-7910, is “Trying to call ”getDecorator()” with the full decorator name is not working until we call ”getDecorators()” first:”. So it is related to my favorite component, ”Zend_Form”, which is the only component of ZF that explicitly uses decorators. Although it is very old and marked as minor, I am interested in this issue, because the reporter states that the behavior is confusing, and I agree that it is. –by Bart McLeod

Some communities are great, but the PHP Community is totally different, and when the spirit comes out, it shows all of its potential and greatness. –by Rafael Dohms

Security researchers should be encouraged to submit bug reports, it is in the best interest of everyone. –by Arne Blankerts

I must confess that I am not a big fan of unit testing. There, I said it. –by Marco Tabini

Whether it’s displaying a simple “Last Changed” date on a webpage or building a full-featured calendar application, ”strtotime()” is my best friend. –by John M. Stokes

Keep moving forward, one step at a time. –by Elizabeth Tucker Long