PHP Tips Revisted - Are they still relevant in today's world of frameworks?

10 Advanced PHP Tips Revisited | How-To | Smashing Magazine

This article is a rebuttal to 10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming — henceforth referred to as the previous article — published last November here on Smashing Magazine. The introduction sounds intriguing:

Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program.

Unfortunately, the intrigue devolves into disappointment. We disagree with many of the tips, and even when we don’t, the accompanying explanation is weak or misleading. In this article, we go through each and every tip from the previous article and provide our own commentary and evidence, either to validate and clarify the tip, or to refute it. Our hope is that you don’t just accept our opinion, but rather learn enough to form your own.

php, tips, security

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Learning the Zend Framework

I'm in the process of trying to learn the Zend framework. I'm using it for a small project and just trying to get familiar with it. There is really a lot of information. If you have been working on your own MVC framework, this probably can substitute for your own quite nicely. A lot of it is overkill probably designed for the likes of IBM but it is nice to know that it is there.

I finished the quickstart tutorial but the tutorial does not really match up with the documentation too well. For example, the tutorial makes use of the autoload function whereas the documentation does not really discuss it too much. Oh well. Nothing like trial and error when learning a new piece of software.

Setting up my PHP Web Development Environment

I'm in the process of setting up my PHP web development environment again. This blog will be about the tools, software, hardware and services I use. Right now, I'm looking at using

• Netbeans IDE 6.5 for development. I have been a long-time user of Eclipse but decided it was time for a change to see how Netbeans compares to Eclipse for PHP development.
• Subversion for version control. I never develop without it. Assume that every project will have multiple changes and will need constant updating. With subversion, I can do the work on my desktop and update the production machine with very little effort. Current version I'm using is 1.5.
• XAMPP - Apachefriends PHP/MySQL/Apache2 package for Mac OS X. After a long absence, I'm returning to using their software. I left when they did not update it as quickly as I needed them too. After compiling my own packages for a while, I just thought it was time to go ahead and try them out again.
• Mac OS laptop - stable and fairly problem free.

So, that is the current setup. Additional details will be added when able.