XML literals come to PHP via Facebook: XHP

Facebook engineer Marcel Laverdet has written up the XHP project on which he has been working at Facebook, and which he says is “quickly becoming a cornerstone of front-end PHP development at Facebook”. XHP enables XML fragments to be valid PHP expressions. In addition, most HTML elements have been pre-defined as variables. The project

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Is Zend really the PHP company?

I’m at Yahoo! Hack day in London – not hacking, but here for sessions on topics such as YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) and PHP.

I had a brief chat with Rasmus Lerdorf who is speaking later. I asked him about Zend, which presents itself as the PHP company (that is actually the slogan

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Microsoft Expression Web causes PHP error

I ran into a strange and surprising PHP error today. I’m working on a little PHP application which has a login page. The login script calls session_start() to start or resume a PHP session. It was working OK so I decided to decorate the page a little (I was working in Eclipse). I like

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Salesforce.com linking with Facebook, Amazon

I’m at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, where Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, and co-founder Parker Harris, are presenting new features in the force.com platform.

The first is a built-in ability to publish your Force.com data as a public web site. The service is currently in “developer preview” and set for full release

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When will PHP Developer Tools be mainstream at Eclipse?

I’ve been doing a little PHP work and enjoying it; I like PHP 5.x much better than earlier versions. My PHP development setup is based on Eclipse and the PHP Developer Tools project, or PDT, and one thing I noticed when I set this up is that it is awkward to use PDT with

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Future of Web Apps 2008 Day One: Web is DVD, desktop VHS

I’m at London’s dreary Excel centre for Carson’s Future of Web Apps conference, just before the opening of day two. Yesterday was a mixed bag; good when speakers talk technical; bad when they descend into marketing. The origins of the conference are as a start-up incubator; developers and entrepreneurs getting together to see what’s

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Zend PHP Framework adds support for Adobe Flex, AMF

The PHP company Zend has announced a collaboration with Adobe to integrate AMF (Action Message Format) into the Zend Framework. AMF is an efficient binary format which is more efficient for transmitting data than text-based formats like XML or JSON. Zend and Adobe are also collaborating to improve their tools for work with applications

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Debugging PHP code to fix a WordPress problem

How do you debug a PHP application? Traditionally developers resort to outputting variable values to HTML, or peering through logs, but why not set breakpoints and step through code just as you would in C# or Java? Maybe because it can take some effort to set this up, as I was reminded today.

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Windows server compromised by PHP application

Susan Bradley has posted her analysis of how her Windows server was hacked.

This is interesting to me, as Bradley is an expert on server administration and patching; I’m glad she has had the courage to post all these details, thus benefiting the community, rather than pretending the server was down for emergency maintenance

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Cenzic web app report highlights security problems

Will we ever get a secure Internet? There’s no cause for optimism in the latest Cenzic report into web app security. A few highlights:

7 out of 10 Web applications analyzed by Cenzic were found vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting attacks 70% of Internet vulnerabilities are in web applications FireFox has the most reported browser

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