Mental notes to myself

There is an article on PHP on CIO, bashing it a bit.

PHP may be the most popular Web scripting language in the world. But despite a large collection of nails, not every tool is a hammer. So when should it be used, and when would another dynamic programming language be a better choice? We identify its strengths and weaknesses.

For the ones, who doesn’t know about CIO, their target audience is managerial. not developers.
So potentially reader will be your manager and they’ll get this info as a reference.
I’m copy/pasting some parts of it for your convenience. Let’s assume your manager does not know about PHP (I hope not) and you’re about to convince him/her to use PHP on a project. What whould he/she think after reading this?

When should you use PHP?

• Creating an intranet site.
• Prototyping an application that will be converted to Java or some other language.
• Creating a Web database application.
• Deploying an inexpensive or quick solution.
• Using ready-made apps from Sourceforge.net or other sites.

In general you should not use PHP:

• Where data security is of high importance.
• In Shell or automated scripted applications.
• In enterprise applications where scalability takes higher precedence than economy.

What a short sight!?!? Kenneth Hess the author of the article, is also the new “On The Desktop” columnist for Linux Magazine. Honestly, I would not really expect these claims from Ken Hess.

Please share your comment.

Link: You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!

I’ve just finish checking this years roster for PHP Quebec Conference 2008.
The list is quite good. Lots of interesting sessions, some not-so-really-php sessions. But this year, there is no Rasmus
I’ve always found him interesting to listen to and inspiring. It’s quite interesting to see what challenges he’s seeing at Yahoo.
Between the lines, he gives a lot of tips. Is it just me who likes him talking ?
I’m sorry that he’ll not be in Montreal this year. Maybe he didn’t like the food last year lol.

Nobody denies the benefits of testing and especially unit testing.
However I’m still having hard time understanding the baised testing methodology of phpunit or other automated unit testing frameworks.

In test driven development, programmer writes a test then fills in the code to make the test pass. I find this extremely baised.
Alternatively, I find coding baised test cases that can cover the code 100% gives the developers a false sense of safety. This is rather a phylosophycal discussion than practical.

For complex scenarios of testing, can unit testing cover everything efficiently? How efficient is to find and write the correct test cases that test everything throughly? Does any company have the time and money for this (or they are willing to pay for their testers to write code for 100% coverage) ?

I really like the idea of php unit and automated tests. However for web, I’m still for the black box testing, if there is a good way of analysing the efficiency of blackbox tests.
Feel free to comment.

Updated: typos

I’m looking for 2 PHP Programmer for the company I’m working for.
I’ll be hiring a Senior and Intermediate PHP programmer.

If you’re in Montreal, QC and intrested in drop a comment I’ll contact you.
This is not a webmaster/designer etc job, if you’re a pure PHP programmer I want you!

Position: Full Time, Permanent
Industry: IT Multimedia/Entertainment
Qualifications: PHP, MySQL, Apache, Javascript (Ajax)
Assets: CSS, Java,Oracle, PL/SQL
Important: Version Controlling (CVS,SVN or BitKeeper), Debugging (XDebug, Zend or DBG)
Start Date: Immediate

PS: If you are a PHP Guru, you should definately apply, it’s a well paid job.
PSS: This ad is valid until the end of 2007.

Important update: If you are not already living in Montreal, you don’t need to apply. Thank you.

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This site is about articles, it crawls all known article directories, article publishing sites and gethers articles from them.
It has a really extensive categorical index. currently I have about 1000 articles but the number is growing daily.
I used Php / Mysql / Apache to build up the site. I’m planning to add some ajax toys by the time.
You can also submit articles too.

Visit me and tell me what you think thanks…

PHP 4.4.0 is just released.

Here is the change log.

Many popular PHP-based blogging, wiki and content management programs can be exploited through a security hole in the way PHP programs handle XML commands. The flaw allows an attacker to compromise a web server, and is found in programs including PostNuke, WordPress, Drupal, Serendipity, phpAdsNew, phpWiki and phpMyFAQ, among others.

The flaw affects the XML-RPC function, which has many uses in web applications, including “ping” update notifications for RSS feeds. PHP libraries that allow applications to exchange XML data using remote procedure calls(RPC) fail to fully check incoming data for malicious commands. The affected libraries, including PHPXMLRPC and Pear XML-RPC, are included in many interactive applications written in PHP.

Thankfully Wordpress has already responded to that.

worths checking this Spell Checker