Like it or not, as a professional developer, sooner or later you are going to do some customising (if you are lucky, "extending") of existing software. If you are not familiar with the software, it is good advice to look into it before accepting the job. I had to learn that the hard way. But how do you recognize crappy applications without getting knee deep into the code? 10 pointers to identify crappy PHP software quickly...

15 very useful PHP code snippets for PHP developers

Separation of concerns is a concept in object-oriented (OO) software design that allows you to build more-modular applications. Modular applications are easier to maintain and add new features to. PHP's OO language features allow you to apply design concepts to build more robust, maintainable applications.

We all love web pages that load super fast and as Google pushes us to “make the web faster,” we must heed the call. In my search for ways to increase efficiency while decreasing page load times and bandwidth output, I happened upon the wonderful world of Zlib compression. This compression type uses gzip to compress the output of your files and feed them to the browser.

n the world of the web, lots of sites are popping up requiring users to login. When you need to do so, there's a bit more security than you might realize. What you didn't account for, is that all those username/password combinations a hacker just made off with? Yea, those are the same login's to important stuff, like e-mail, or bank accounts. Yikes!

It’s time to bring the keyboard back! When we first started doing things on the web, there wasn’t much to do. There were documents with hyperlinks that we can click on but that’s about it; that was 15 years ago. Thanks to the growth of sophisticated server-side tools such as PHP and client-side tools such as jQuery, we are now able to do so much more.

Ever wanted to jump to another section within your code? The goto operator included in PHP 5.3 gives you just that option. Here is an example of the code.

As PHP developers download and start testing the biggest change to the language in 7 years, many are wondering not about Santa’s bag full of new toys for them to use in building tomorrow’s applications but about the changes in the language that will affect yesterday’s applications.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes.

Flash Builder 4 can really speed up the development of data-driven applications. There are new wizards that can help you create the data service and the data model on the client side, and map client side operations to server side operations (CRUD applications). This post is an introduction to the new Data/Services view from Flash Builder 4 (I am using a PHP server and a PHP class).

Useful for testing/knowing your knowledge in particular topic (e.g php,QTP) and also it will be helpful for learning.You can select Question type such as Easy, Medium, and Hard.

A proposal for type hinting in php that might satisfy both the strict type and the loose type camps.

A simple method to get some type safety into your JPA queries, using fake JavaBean properties.

If you are a facebook geek like me, you must have noticed till now the image rotate functionality in the photo albums. Facebook allows you to rotate images 90 degree clockwise and anti-clockwise after image upload. Below I will show you how did I achieve cloning facebook’s 90 degree rotation functionality and also added a custom degree rotation (functionality usually seen in collage tools).

An easy to use and install plugin for Zend Framework that will sit under your pages and shows a debug console. Works with Facebook, redirects and ajax requests

Simple Function To Get Rid Of Annoying Code.

Last week I looked at how send a username and password with PHP CURL. Using CURL is useful because you can examine the return information to see if the request was successful etc, but if your hosting provider doesn't have CURL for PHP enabled then you can still attempt to get the file by using file_get_contents and passing the authentication as part of the $context parameter.

This is not yet another regular expression replacement template engine. The template engine uses PHP itself to render the template. The template itself is very intuitive to people who are already familiar with PHP. There is no extra learning for additional syntax - the template code itself is just plain PHP code. Though I haven't done any benchmark, from my past experience of using it, it is pretty fast - consider that it consists of less than 100 lines of code. Thinking of using Smarty?