Posts Tagged ‘PHP’

Its quite a common occurrence to hear that PHP has been described as “Insecure”. You will hear this among many developers that choose not to use PHP. However, this bad light has been created by it’s users. Let me explain.

Today, I’ve had us transfered to a server with PHP5 installed on it, rather than PHP4. This meant some downtime around midday (GMT) and we lost quite a few visits during that period (damn). Anyway, the advantage to this is: a slight performance increase due to the re-write of some of the functions in PHP5 (although really un-noticeable). The main reason I upgraded is that I want to use some of the XML parsing features, callbacks and exceptions that are new to PHP5. I’ve also got another layout for this site in the works, and that will be done in about 2-3 weeks I assume. Also by magic, comments from yesterday onwards have got deleted, don’t ask my how or why.

One of the things that most scared me when creating database driven applications with PHP was the thought of someone messing with my database by using SQL injection attacks. I had heard about this from various times before thanks to other sites, but didn’t really know what it meant or what harm it could cause. In this article, I hope to enlighten you.

The use of abstraction layers is a controversial topic among PHP users. There are many reasons why people use them, and likewise why they don’t. The fact is, abstraction layers will always be around and they provide a very quick way of creating applications, even though for very high traffic sites, it may be a performance hit to use large libraries if they aren’t properly scripted. In this article I will be going through the advantages and disadvantages of using the ADODB database abstraction layer. This article is biased in it’s favour but I will also be discussing the disadvantages.

In this short article, I will be introducing you to PHP. There will be no actual code, just a bit of background knowledge. This article is going to be one of a series of PHP articles/tutorials introducing you to PHP.