Introducing Design Patterns
Practical, Reusable Solutions

By Robert Peake

As web professionals are called upon to tackle increasingly complex problems in the enterprise, the question of choosing a flexible software architecture becomes ever more critical to the maintainability, scalability, and adaptability of the software systems we build. In the lifecycle of a web-based application, perhaps more than any other type of code base, dramatic changes are inevitable, and refactoring is a must. Design patterns can assist you in preparing for change and make the revision process trivial – rather than terrifying – by introducing highly flexible models for component interaction. In this edition, we will look at the abstract factory, singleton, and adapter patterns using practical examples designed specifically for PHP.[Read More]

Guru Speak
Output Buffering

By Chris Shiflett

Welcome to another edition of Guru Speak. The topic I have chosen for this edition is output buffering – a technique that comes in many forms and has many different applications. In this article, I mainly focus on PHP's output buffering and the interesting and useful things you can do with it. This article will help you appreciate the power and convenience of output buffering and motivate you to your own creative ways to use output buffering to enhance your applications.[Read More]

Building a Weblog with PHP
Everyone Has a Blog. Why Don't You?

By Oscar Renalias & Michael Erdmann

The beauty of blogs is that you don't need to be a public figure beforehand to make yourself heard. If you don't have a blog yet and have been thinking of getting one for yourself, chances are that you have already tried out some of the readymade solutions out there. It is also equally likely that none of them fit your needs, and you have decided to give up. Wait no more, this is just the article for were looking for: a two-parter that begins with blogging jargon, and cruises on to provide a clear description on how to build your very own blog tool, based on well-known software design principles.[Read More]

Building an Intranet
More than Just the Coding

By Richard Nuttall

Building a powerful, data-driven intranet can give a company a huge leap in efficiency. To make sure it is a net gain rather than an impediment to the company requires care and a lot of planning. The article looks at the approach to building a data-driven intranet to improve the work efficiency of a company that can't cope with their current system. We look at the people aspects of building the system as well as some of the fundamental rules to follow to ensure that you get a good result. Finally, we look at maintenance and security issues that need to be taken into account when building an intranet, and the relationship between an intranet and the public web site.[Read More]

Encrypting PHP Code
Protecting Your Intellectual Property

By Rubén Martínez Ávila

Encryption is a useful subject for all developers, especially those in the PHP community, who'd like to distribute their applications, yet want to protect their code. In this article, read about an effective way to encrypt your PHP source code, so you can protect your ideas and distribute your applications on the Web. Starting with PHP's bcompiler extension, the article goes on to show how to code a manager, to encrypt your source code. Finally, the article discusses some ways of using this encrypted code and how to distribute it on different platforms.[Read More]

MySQL Views for Data Migration
Using SQL Views in MySQL 5.0

By Morgan Tocker

Prior to MySQL 5, you had to write scripts that ran as daemons, constantly checking for changes to the data. While this was manageable, it was always a few seconds behind and introduced a series of its own problems. SQL Views are a new feature in MySQL 5.0, and offer an excellent way to convert data at the database level. One of the less known uses for views is data migration. This article demonstrates how to use views to 'translate' data, at the database level, back and forth between a horrid legacy schema and a new schema.[Read More]

How Would You Like to Get KINKY in PHP
The PHP Framework for Building e-learning Apps

By Derek Keats

The KINKY application framework and the KEWL.NextGen e-learning platform based on it were developed in the Free Software Innovation Unit at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town, South Africa. Both the projects are under continuous development by developers at UWC and in twelve other African universities as part of the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project. KINKY is being used at UWC to develop a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an Enterprise Architecture (EA) Knowledge Portal as part of their EA strategy.[Read More]

Book Review: From the Prentice Hall Stable
CORE Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL

By Mitchell Pirtle

Although I have covered other PHP/MySQL books before this one, it was with great interest that I started reading this one. Something about the presentation of the book itself indicated a slightly different approach – a unique insight into building web applications with two of the most popular technologies. Checking out the table of contents brings that first impression back to the forefront, as this book goes well beyond the needs of explaining programming, and provides pages of insight on non-programming topics such as architecture planning and three very topical example applications: an appointment manager, a blogging engine, and an e-commerce application.[Read More]