PHP Resources & Information

PHP Resources

Resources
Scripts
Coding Standards
Scripting Tutorials
Programming
Security
Source Codes
Smarty Templates
LAMP Architecture
Projects
PHP Object Oriented Programming

About PHP

PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic Web pages. PHP is used mainly in server-side application software, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications.

PHP is the market-leading dynamic language supporting object oriented programming for producing modern Web applications. Its popularity for building content management and e-commerce systems stems from its portability, ease of use, and wide support for accessing database and enterprise data sources. IBM and Zend Technologies have partnered to deliver Zend Core for IBM®, which is the industry's only certified and fully supported PHP development and production environment for IBM data servers.

PHP competes with Visual Basic and C++ as the third most popular programming language behind Java and C, based on world wide availability of practitioners, courses and vendors. Available under the PHP License, PHP is an open source language and considered to be free software by the Free Software Foundation.

PHP was written as a set of CGI binaries in the C programming language by the Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. "Personal Home Page Tools" was publicly released on June 8, 1995 after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI.

Syntax

<?php  
// PHP statements here  ?>
Regular HTML here
<?php  
// More PHP Statements  ?>

PHP Resources

PHP includes a large number of free and open source libraries with php resources the core build. PHP is a fundamentally Internet-aware system with modules built in for accessing FTP servers, many database servers, embedded SQL libraries such as embedded MySQL and SQLite, LDAP servers, and others. Many functions familiar to C programmers such as those in the stdio family are available in the standard PHP build resources and advanced LAMP Architecture.

PHP extensions have been written to add support for the Windows API, process management on Unix-like operating systems, multibyte strings (Unicode), cURL, and several popular compression formats. Some more unusual features include integration with Internet relay chat, and dynamic generation of images and Adobe Flash content. Some additional extensions are available via the PHP Resources Extension Community Library PHP Resources.

Criticism

Criticisms of PHP include those general criticisms ascribed to other Scripting languages and dynamically typed languages. This list includes criticisms that have been rectified in recent versions.

• PHP has traditionally inserted data received over the network directly into the language namespace ("register_globals"), leading to confusion between trusted and untrusted data, and hence innumerable security holes in PHP applications.
• PHP has traditionally used features such as "magic_quotes_gpc" and "magic_quotes_runtime" which attempt to escape apostrophes (') and quotes (") in strings in the assumption that they will be used in databases, to prevent SQL injection attacks. This leads to confusion over which data is escaped and which is not, and to problems when data is not in fact used as input to a database.
• PHP does not have native support for Unicode or multibyte strings.
• PHP does not enforce the declaration of variables prior to their use, and variables which have not been initialized can have operations (such as concatenation) performed on them; an operation on an uninitialized variable raises an E_NOTICE level error, but this is hidden by default.
• PHP has no namespace support, with all PHP functions sharing the same global namespace.
• PHP's type checking is very loose, potentially causing problems. Variable types in PHP, although they exist, are transparent to the programmer; though some may consider this a feature, as a variable can change from int to double and back again without extra lines of code.
• The standard function library lacks internal consistency. Many functions perform relatively similar actions and have different name standards and argument orders. For example, strpos($haystack, $needle) vs. in_array($needle, $haystack), and strcasecmp vs. stristr.
• Some PHP extensions use libraries that are not threadsafe, thus rendering with Apache 2's Multi-Processing Module or Microsoft's IIS in ISAPI mode may cause crashes.

Password, Storage and Security

There are many conflicting theories about what to do with passwords. How secure is secure enough? What should your PHP script do with them? Is this just paranoia? This article will provide some general information on dealing with passwords, and some techniques you can use in your PHP scripts.

This article will provide you an overview of various PHP security issues and offer advice on secure PHP programming practices. PHP Resources has achieved a stable and solid presence on the Web in the last several years, and its popularity as a server-side scripting language is only increasing. Its primary use is for providing dynamically generated interfaces between Web users and the host. As such, PHP scripts fall natural prey to many Internet attacks. Despite the fact that the language is designed with security in mind, a familiarity with its more dangerous aspects and conformance to common secure programming guidelines is essential to minimizing the possibility of security compromises. The aim of this document is to provide an overview of various security issues with PHP and to offer advice on secure PHP programming practices.

Currently small informational tidbits about Cross Site Scripting holes exist but none really explain them to an average person or administrator. This FAQ was written to provide a better understanding of this emerging threat, and to give guidance on detection and prevention.

One of the big causes of errors in PHP scripts is the lack of a portable code standard. In this article, Derek takes a look at a few little things that we can do to help make our PHP scripts more portable. When other developers comes to use them, they will have more of a chance of working successfully the first time, without the need to perform any kind of system configuration modifications, etc.

PHP Future

Quite simply the most popular server-side web scripting technology on the Internet with usage growing at 6.5% monthly according to a netcraft survey.

Basically, it is a free software package that runs on your web server. It is specifically designed for creating robust and reliable dynamic web pages for e-commerce and other mission critical web applications. It is also required to run php based softSWOT software titles. If php is not supported by your web server then these software titles will not function.

Most commercial web servers currently run php. Most free web hosts do not. If you are running a business web site on a free host consider upgrading so you can really benefit from the opportunities the internet offers business.

In the December 2006 survey we received responses from 105,244,649 sites, an increase of 3.8 million hostnames from last month, when the survey topped 100 million sites for the first time. The increase brings the Web's total growth for 2006 to 30.9 million sites, shattering the previous one-year record gain of 17.5 million sites from 2005.

In percentage terms, the Web grew by 41.5 percent this year. That's a significant gain, but still trails the record performance from 2000, when the explosive growth of the dot-com boom took the survey from 10 million to nearly 26 million sites, a one-year increase of 160 percent.

There was a split in this month's trends for web server market share, as Apache gained ground in hostnames (+0.32 percent top 50.6 percent share) while losing share in active sites, slipping 0.84 percent to fall below 60 percent share. Apache still holds a commanding lead in both metrics.

Smarty Templates Advantage

One of Smartys primary design goals is to facilitate the separation of application code from presentation. Typically, the application code contains the business logic of your application, written and maintained in PHP Resources code. This code is maintained by programmers. The presentation is the way your content is presented to the end user, which is written and maintained in template files. The smarty templates for PHP are maintained by template designers.

At its most basic function, the application code collects content, assigns it to the template engine and displays it. The content might be something like the headline, tagline, author and body of a newspaper article. The application code has no concern how this content will be presented in the template. The template designer is responsible for the presentation. They edit the template files, adding markup and bringing it to completion. This typically involves things like HTML tags PHP Resources, cascading style sheets and other tools provided by the template engine.

PHP Resources & Tutorials

PHP Resources is a powerful server-side scripting language for creating dynamic and interactive websites.

PHP is the widely-used, free, and efficient alternative to competitors such as Microsoft's ASP. PHP is perfectly suited for Web development and can be embedded directly into the HTML code.

The PHP syntax is very similar to Perl and C. PHP Resources is often used together with Apache (web server) on various operating systems. It also supports ISAPI and can be used with Microsoft's IIS on Windows. you will find a complete scripting references / tutorials of all PHP functions.

Community Projects

SourceForge is a collaborative software development management system. SourceForge is proprietary software and is sold by VA Software. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of open source applications projects (such as PostgreSQL and Subversion PHP Resources).

SourceForge.net is a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development, and acts as a source codes repository. SourceForge.net is hosted by VA Software and runs a version of the SourceForge software. A large number of open source projects are hosted on the site (it had reached 136,923 projects and 1,460,877 registered users as of July 2006), although it does contain many dormant or single-user PHP projects.