Southern writes:  

Though precise statistics are difficult to obtain, PHP is undeniably a top choice as a Website building language. Since October 2009, the TIOBE Programming Community Index has PHP holding third place -- behind Java and C -- among programming languages overall. Regardless of the exact extent of PHP's usage, you need only consider that Web sites such as Facebook -- which manages millions of users and petabytes of content -- use PHP; workloads of that magnitude demand a serious programming language and supporting environment.

You can't build a world-class Website without a good development environment. In the case of PHP, the development environment must be particularly capable; a PHP programmer will rarely be programming only in PHP. PHP is necessarily entwined with HTML and JavaScript on the front end and with SQL on the back end. Consequently, a good PHP IDE must allow the developer to work with equal ease in multiple languages (both programming and markup) and contexts.

In this article, we examine eight IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use.

more: InfoWorld

Southern writes:  

You can think of PHP as a general purpose computing language if you want to, but it was designed with one task in mind and it is almost exclusively used for that task - generating web pages. So while it might be more flattering to PHP to introduce it in the widest possible context this would be misleading and it would make the job of learning how to use it harder than it needs to be.

So let's say the obvious to make it 100% clear.

* PHP is a language that creates web pages.

What this means in practice is that a PHP program's objective in life is to generate HTML or Javascript or anything else that you might find in a web page. In most cases and certainly when you are first learning PHP the web technology that is used is HTML.

Again to state the obvious:

* The output of a typical PHP program is HTML

This means that to make any sense of PHP you also have to know about the web technology that the program is generating, and in particular HTML. In practice this shouldn't be a huge problem because HTML isn't difficult and mostly the way that PHP makes use of it is fairly simple. However, it is important to know that it is possible that you could have a problem with understanding a PHP program simply because you can't understand the HTML it is generating.

more: i-programmer

kguske writes:  

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That's right. Facebook is a technology company, serving billions and billions of pages each week (actually, over 100 billion per week, but I couldn't resist a nod to Carl Sagan and McDonald's). And doing so efficiently. So it should come as no surprise that the company has developed some unique software. On Feb. 2, the company released HipHop for PHP.

What is HipHop for PHP? Facebook describes it as:

...a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

This is a fascinating look behind the scenes of arguably one of the most successful websites ever (and certainly, one of the most successful PHP-based websites). But do so quickly before Google, Oracle or someone with higher revenues and / or stock valuation decides to snatch Facebook up...

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kguske writes:  

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InfoWorld reviews 8 PHP integrated development environments (IDEs): ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. Comparison factors include ease-of-use, tools, web & SQL support, documentation, installation and value.

And the winner is...

‍ Read More...

SECUNIA ADVISORY ID: SA37821

VERIFY ADVISORY: http://secunia.com/advisories/37821/

DESCRIPTION: Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in PHP, some of which have unknown impacts and others that can be exploited by malicious users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks and cause a DoS (Denial of Service). The vulnerabilities are reported in versions prior to 5.2.12. Read More...

floppydrivez writes:  

Just a very small hack I came up with to allow only logged in admins to see.

We all know that the phpinfo function can be very helpful to determining server variables and also a security risk to leave on your server. Anyway, read the full details below.

Phpnuke PhpInfo for Admins Only

Floppy,
Clan Themes Staff