I have been doing a lot of PHP development for my bachelor thesis over the last few months. We are working in a team of six and it is not always trivial to keep track of all the changes to the code, and debugging code you are not all that familiar with is a pain in the ass. To resolve my debugging issue I decided it was time I got Xdebug into the mix.
Happy new year! Over the last six months I’ve become the proud owner of both an iPhone and an iPad. Indeed, the fanboy accusations are getting hard to dismiss. Anyhow, my fiancée also got an iPhone and I thought I should do something useful with that. The result? Instantly updated grocery lists (or classified government documents, if that’s more up your alley).
Let’s cut the crap: I’m a fan-boy, plain and simple. I’m an Apple fan-boy and I’m a Google fan-boy. I love the simplicity of the products they create, and for the most part everything just works. I’ve been using Gmail since 2004 when it was still in closed beta and have never felt the need to use anything else. Somehow though, it took me almost six years to realize I was using it all wrong.
About a month ago I wrote a post on how to protect your forms from double posting and CSRF attacks using nonce words in CodeIgniter. I realized pretty soon though that the code I posted wasn’t as smooth or, in fact, as functional as it should be. So to save my own ass I though I should share this update with you guys.
I love the rapid development of the technological wonder that is the Internet and it’s standards. The early nineties brought us static HTML pages which, but as time moved on more and more processing took place at the servers with a variety of server-side languages. However during the last few years much processing has been transferred to the browser using Javascript. This has meant that the majority of all browsers have gotten along for the ride and spent a lot of time speeding up the execution of these scripts. Out of curiosity I decided to compare the time it takes to perform a few standard actions in both JS and PHP.
I guess most of you might have seen the mockups for the UI redesign planned for Firefox. It’s about time something was done about it, not because it’s currently ugly per se, just not as good-looking as the opposition. I though I’d give you a break-down of some other changes we can look forward to in the next milestone for the best browser in the world (now pay up Mozilla!).
Most websites where authentication is required to perform certain actions have the option of remembering your credentials. Convenient, indeed, but bypassing the user input phase of the login means some other type of identifier needs to be stored locally which could pose a severe security risk.
In a web application for record collectors I wrote a few years ago I recently had to deal with users who added the same record hundreds of times. I did use the PRG, or Post/Redirect/Get, pattern which means that you always redirect the user after a post request so that a simple reload won’t resubmit the same data. This prevents users from mistakenly resubmitting, but by pressing the back-button the problem re-emerges. The solution is called a nonce.
CalendarDate validation usually means regular expressions, and regular expressions usually means headache. All in all, I do think that PHP’s date handling is pretty sweet, but native validation is still lacking. With PHP 5.3 though, we are one step closer thanks to a new function with the infinitely long name date_parse_from_format. I’m going to show you how it can be used to create a validation function for any PHP date format.
I recently finished a project for a client where a large part of the site was made up of static pages. The obvious approach for this is to create controllers and methods to load these views, meaning that the method team() in controller Football would load the view views/football/team.php and be done with it. Is there a better way?
