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If you’ve been following this blog (my colleague, David Busby, posted about it yesterday) or any tech news outlet in the past few days, you’ve probably seen some mention of the “Heartbleed” vulnerability in certain versions of the OpenSSL library.So what is ‘Heartbleed’, really?In short, Heartbleed is an information-leak issue. An attacker can exploit this bug to retrieve the contents of a server’

We are very happy to report that DevOps.com was selected as an official media sponsor for the upcoming DevOps Summit 2014 at the Javits Center in NYC on June 10-12.  The 2nd International DevOps Summit is part of the Cloud Expo, the leading conference on all things Cloud. The lineup of speakers for the DevOps Summit is stellar.  To the right is a picture of the speakers who are confirmed so far.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today about the challenges of password hashing and some of the common risks that can come with it. It’s a continuation of a previous article about the actual techniques for hashing in PHP. The fact that the output of a hash function cannot be reverted back to the input using an efficient algorithm does not mean that it cannot be cracked. Databases containin

MySQL software developers are under pressure to do more in less time and create applications that adapt to ever-changing requirements. And it’s true that some of a developer’s time is wasted when his or her method of optimizing involves trying every combination of code and index definition.There is a better way. And next Wednesday at 10 a.m. Pacific time, I’ll show you how. In my webinar, “How to

How often do you go through the following process when coding? Need a [insert programming language here] function definition and examples Google for said function Click first result which is either w3schools if you’re out of luck, or the online manual of the language you’re dealing with. Realize you need another function demoed and explained Go back to Google instead of using the search on the la

It seems like cloud deployment environments are all the rage these years – from AWS to Google App Engine, Windows Azure to DigitalOcean, and more popping up every month. With all these environments, it’s important to be able to deploy the software you need. In this tutorial, adapted from the step by step trial and error procedure of duythien, and with his full blessing, we’ll cover the installatio

I’ve written about Phalcon before, and we’ve got a variety of articles on the framework published already, which is apparent if you just visit the Phalcon category. In fact, not so long ago, I wrote about Zephir, Phalcon’s noble initiative to make building PHP extensions accessible to everyone. Today, a new milestone has been reached by the team, and one that definitely warrants discussion. Way ah

On PHPBuilder.com today they have a new article posted sharing a few different methods you can use to do backups of your (MySQL) database and a few handy tricks/tools you can use to optimize it as well. Every computer system has a backup. Nevertheless, the number of problems caused by a lack of a recent backup is huge. One of the reasons for that may be the fact that the backup process is not e

It’s been a while since Google announced PHP support on Google App Engine. This article series will take you through all the necessary steps in getting your app up and running on GAE. For this tutorial, we’ll be using PhpStorm which supports GAE projects out of the box, but you can use any IDE of your choice. Start by respecting the prerequisites for your platform. This is necessary because the Go

In my previous article we’ve discovered the basics of PHP Streams and how powerful they were. In this tutorial we are going to use this power in the real world. First I’ll show you how to build your custom filters and attach them to a stream, then we’ll package our filters inside a document parser application. You are encouraged to read the previous article in case you haven’t yet, as understandin

Big web operations like Twitter or Facebook implement continuous delivery as a matter of course. But it may not be suitable for all enterprises.

The QaFoo team has made available a tool they’ve created to track changes in PHP projects, the QaFoo Changetrack tool. Since quite some time I’ve talked to people about the idea for a tool that tracks changes in the classes and methods of your PHP project in order to detect which entities are changed most frequently, which are often affected bugs and other statistics. After some hacking, we are

More organizations are doing continuous delivery these days, despite the challenges. Writing for the Register, Adrian Bridgwater discusses situations in which continuous delivery may need to be modified to work well. Bridgwater says web ops companies that have a web-based front end and cloud-based backend have the ideal environment for a “ship early and ship often” approach to continuous deployme

More organizations are doing continuous delivery these days, despite the challenges. Writing for the Register, Adrian Bridgwater discusses situations in which continuous delivery may need to be modified to work well. Bridgwater says web ops companies that have a web-based front end and cloud-based backend have the ideal environment for a “ship early and ship often” approach to continuous deployme

More organizations are doing continuous delivery these days, despite the challenges. Writing for the Register, Adrian Bridgwater discusses situations in which continuous delivery may need to be modified to work well. Bridgwater says web ops companies that have a web-based front end and cloud-based backend have the ideal environment for a “ship early and ship often” approach to continuous deployme

On the PHPMagazin.de site today, they’ve posted the video from this year’s International PHP Conference of the panel discussion of “the cloud” and what’s in it for businesses (note: original page is in German). Who really needs the cloud? […] Speaker Rainer Stropek (software architect at gmbh), Frank Muller (Canonical) and Glen Campbell (Rackspace) spoke on a keynote panel in Munich

Related MicroZone Resources Like this piece? Share it with your friends: The list of reasons why developers “toss stuff over the wall” is too large to tackle individually, but there are a few classics. Deadlines, end of day jitters, and irresponsibility are common and top the list. For the uninitiated, “tossing stuff over the wall” refers to an unspoken paradigm where p

Related MicroZone Resources Like this piece? Share it with your friends: The list of reasons why developers “toss stuff over the wall” is too large to tackle individually, but there are a few classics. Deadlines, end of day jitters, and irresponsibility are common and top the list. For the uninitiated, “tossing stuff over the wall” refers to an unspoken paradigm where p

Related MicroZone Resources Like this piece? Share it with your friends: DevOps is gaining traction according to a study at the end of 2012 by Puppet Labs. Their study concluded that DevOps adoption within companies grew by 26% year over year. DevOps is still misunderstood and has tremendous room for greater adoption still but let’s be clear about one very important thi

Interactive maps inside a web application have a lot of great uses. From visualizing data to highlighting points of interest, maps are expected to communicate ideas within the context of location easily. The hardest part, however, is converting that data into coordinates that the map can understand. Luckily, Geocoder PHP allows us to connect to different geo-coding providers. Combined with Leafle

Chris Hartjes, testing guru, has a post talking about using arrays in data providers for your unit tests. More specifically about some odd behavior one developer was seeing in their tests. I was asked a question on Twitter by Tex Morgan about a problem he was having with PHPUnit data providers. He was trying to pass in some data and kept wondering why PHPUnit was serializing the data instead of

Sails is a Javascript framework designed to resemble the MVC architecture from frameworks like Ruby on Rails. It makes the process of building Node.js apps easier, especially APIs, single page apps and realtime features, like chat.InstallationTo install Sails, it is quite simple. The prerequisites are to have Node.js installed and also npm, which comes with Node. Then one must issue the following

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP.net: PHP 5.4.21 Released Gonzalo Ayuso: Playing with event dispatcher and Silex. Sending logs to a remote server. Volker Dusch: Please stop pretending PHP is a good language 7PHP.com: PHP Interview With Michael Wallner A Full-Time Core PHP Developer Russell Walker: Active Record vs Data Mapper for Persistence Konrad Podgórski: Step by Step

Tuts+ Premium courses teach you a single skill from top to bottom, inside out.Currently, more than 15,000 members are sharpening their skills in web design, web development, Photoshop, vector design, video effects and much more. Our dedicated team adds new content weekly, so there’s always something fresh to sink your teeth into. Today, we’re highlighting a few of the latest and greatest course/ by Joel Bankhead

It was the klaxon noise that Jacky hated the most. If there was even a whisper of the word “hacked,” Mr. Cullen would sound the alarm. “All-hands meeting, boardroom, right now,” Mr. Cullen said. He left the klaxon on as the employees of Red Feather assembled in the boardroom. “The webserver,” he said gravely, “is no longer responsive. We’re being hacked as we speak.” Jacky suppressed a laugh. “

Russell Walker has a new post today comparing two popular methods for abstracting out database access and working with your data – the Active Record and Data Mapper patterns for data persistence. These two design patterns are explained in Martin Fowler’s book ‘Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture’, and represent ways of handling data persistence in object oriented programming. He g

In Volker Dusch’s latest post he makes a suggestion to the PHP community as a whole – stop pretending PHP is a good language and admit its flaws where it has them. I’m currently observing two kinds of discussions around the core PHP language. A couple of folks say “Sure the language sucks but look at all the amazing stuff we build with it!” and the other camp goes “Look at all th

On the SitePoint PHP blog there’s a new post from Lukas White about using PHP and web sockets to create a “live score” widget to include in your site. The introduction of web sockets makes it possible for web applications to handle near real-time data without resorting to “hacks” such as long-polling. One example of an application requiring up-to-the-minute data is sports sc

The introduction of web sockets makes it possible for web applications to handle near real-time data without resorting to “hacks” such as long-polling. One example of an application requiring up-to-the-minute data is sports scores. Even now, many websites which display this information use Flash applications, since Actionscript provides the facility to communicate over socket-based conne

Lorenzo Ferrara has a recent post to his site involving the recently released Apigility from Zend and how to to create a basic API endpoint (with code) for a REST API (complete with screenshots). The recently announced Apigility arrives just when I’m experimenting ways to create and maintain my own set of APIs. So I could not resist to giving this new Zend tool a try. […] The test I’m about t

Gonzalo Ayuso has a new post today showing you how to use the Symfony event dispatcher in a Silex-based application. His example involves a simple image processing example. Symfony has one component called The Event Dispatcher. This component is one implementation of Mediator pattern and it’s widely used in modern frameworks, such as Symfony. Silex, as a part of Symfony, also uses this componen

The Software Testing Magazine site has posted some helpful tips for using PHPUnit in a new post. This is part of a series – the first post introducing PHPUnit and the second showing how to use mocks and stubs. I have showed how to set up PHPUnit and how to get started with unit tests and how to handle mocking and stubbing objects in order to effectively isolate your code under test. This article

On the SitePoint PHP blog there’s a new post from Lukas White showing you how to use the Picturefill plugin (Javascript) along with PHP to make responsive images. One of the key challenges with responsive web design, and a subject of much discussion in recent years, is how to deal with images. Setting a max-width on image elements enables designers to allow their size to adapt to the page dimen

Till Klampaeckel has a new post today showing how to get your Composer installation (and package install) to work a bit faster on the Amazon AWS OpsWorks management system. At EasyBib, we’re heavy users of composer and AWS OpsWorks. Since we recently moved a lot of our applications to a continuous deployment model, the benefits of speeding up the deployment process (~4-5 minutes) became more ob

I love Composer. I love the idea of Packagist. But if you are deploying software and being dependent on Packagist you are being almost criminally negligent. The MITM attack is not the only security issue in Packagist, in fact it’s probably not even the worst (which is the behaviour of ‘replace’). Luckily the guys that wrote Composer/Packagist also allow you to run your own version of Satis (the

On the Inviqa techPoral today there’s a new post from Lorna Mitchell showing you how to profile your PHP applications with the help of the XHGui tool (and XHProf extension). Profiling is a technique for observing the performance of an application, ideal for showing up bottlenecks or particularly intensive use of resources. Profiling gets inside your application and gives information about the p

One of the key challenges with responsive web design, and a subject of much discussion in recent years, is how to deal with images. Setting a max-width on image elements enables designers to allow their size to adapt to the page dimensions, but in itself that approach can lead to far bigger images being downloaded than are required. One solution to this is “source sets” – referencing separate imag

Here’s what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Chris Hartjes: The Grumpy Programmer’s PHPUnit Cookbook Sebastian Bergmann: Using PHPUnit from a PHP Archive (PHAR) PHP Town Hall: Episode 1 – Composer Kicks Ass, Laravel 4 Is Coming, and PHP Hosting Sucks (Podcast) Sebastian Göttschkes: symfony2: Testing secure pages PHPMaster.com: Practical Refactoring, Part 1 – What is Good Code? W