Summary: Latest PHP Classes blog posts
Latest posts on the PHP Classes blog
By Manuel Lemos
PHP 5.3.9 release was mostly meant to fix a security bug, but
it introduced a new more serious bug. PHP 5.3.10 was just
released to fix this issue.
Meanwhile Debian Linux maintainers decided to stop enabling the
Suhosin extension by default. This extension is used by several
Linux distributions to provide protection against present and
future security bugs of PHP.
Read this article to learn more about the just fixed bug what
you should do to avoid these security issues. You can also
learn more what is the current PHP security status and the
importance of the Suhosin extension to prevent PHP security
problems.

Date Published: Feb 03, 2012 - 6:59 am
By Manuel Lemos
Earlier in January Ed Finkler announced the MicroPHP manifesto.
It seems to be a rant about against the practices of developers
that make PHP development more complicated than it should be.
This is one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and
Ernani Joppert in the episode 20 of the Lately in PHP
podcast.
They also discuss the final release of PHP 5.4.0 and whether
you should upgrade it or not, the repercussion of the PHP Hash
Collision Vulnerability, as well the trends of PHP world based
on the analysis of the PHP Zeitgeist 2011 initiative.
Listen to the podcast or read the transcript now to learn more
in detail about these interesting PHP topics.

Date Published: Feb 01, 2012 - 11:54 am
By Manuel Lemos
PHP 5.4 is being released after many months of development and
tests.
Read this article to get a brief overview of the features of
this new release and learn about criteria that you may follow
to decide if and when you should upgrade to the new version.

Date Published: Jan 30, 2012 - 1:25 pm
By Manuel Lemos
The PHP Zeitgeist is an initiative that allows us to understand
what were some of the main new trends and concerns of the PHP
developers in the past year.
Read this article to learn about what new things PHP developers
have been searching more in 2011 and what are their needs that
probably still need to be fulfilled.

Date Published: Jan 18, 2012 - 10:54 am
By Manuel Lemos
A security vulnerability found in PHP and many other
programming languages may allow attackers to halt servers with
vulnerable PHP installations.
Read this article to learn more about this vulnerability and
what you can do to avoid that your servers running PHP may be
brought down due to this problem.

Date Published: Jan 12, 2012 - 12:56 pm
By Manuel Lemos
The official PHP implementation is evolving too slowly, while
alternative implementations like Phalanger and Facebook HipHop
can run PHP faster thanks to the use of JIT compiler
engines.
JIT compilation was the main topic of the episode 19 of the
Lately in PHP podcast presented by Manuel Lemos and Ernani
Joppert who received as guests Miloslav Beno of the Phalanger
team and Nuno Lopes of the PECL LLVM project to discuss this
and other interesting topics of the PHP scene.
They also made a brief retrospective of what happened in the
PHP world in 2011 and what they expect for 2012.
Listen to the podcast or read the transcript here.

Date Published: Jan 05, 2012 - 10:10 am
By Manuel Lemos
The site just launched a new feature that hopefully will
encourage the authors that contribute to the site to do better
and eventually get more feedback and recognition from the users
that take advantage of their work.
It is basically a personalized report message that is sent by
e-mail regularly with information about how each author is
doing, as well insights that give them ideas on how they can do
better.
Read this article to learn more about this initiative as well
others there were implemented this year to make this a better
site for authors and users that participate in it.

Date Published: Dec 22, 2011 - 10:37 am
By Manuel Lemos
Phalanger is compiler that generates .NET assemblies from PHP
code, so it runs in a .NET virtual machine.
The latest benchmarks seem to indicate that PHP applications
compiled by Phalanger execute noticeably faster than when they
are executed by the official PHP implementation based on Zend
engine, even when a caching extension is used.
Read this article to learn how Phalanger works and what lessons
can be learned to make the official PHP implementation run at
least as fast, eventually in PHP 6 based on Zend Engine 3.

Date Published: Dec 15, 2011 - 11:50 am
By Avigail Ofer
More and more sites are moving to cloud hosting services to
assure a smooth growth path, as the sites require more servers
to handle the audience growth.
As a developer, you want to ensure that your database is
running smoothly in the cloud, but you do not want to be bogged
down by tedious operations and everything else that goes into
it, like the manual configuration, optimization, maintenance
and development.
Read this article to learn how to connect your PHP app to a
cloud database solution to simplify the way you run your
database.

Date Published: Dec 07, 2011 - 8:16 am
By Manuel Lemos
The recently published article on attracting talented Web
developers by offering remote job positions raised an
interesting debate on the challenges, advantages and
disadvantages of this way of working.
This debate was the main topic of discussion of the episode 18
of the Lately in PHP podcast with Manuel Lemos and Ernani
Joppert, who were joined by César Rodas. César is a top
PHPClasses contributor that has been working remotely for
several years for companies around the world.
They also comment briefly on the PHP 5.3.9 and PHP 5.4 release
candidate versions announced earlier in November.

Date Published: Dec 01, 2011 - 9:55 am