Easy PHP Programming

Although some people may not know it, you can fool around with PHP programming and come up with surprisingly unique yet attractive sites. This includes placing images along with some new scripts which may turn out to be to your advantage in the end as far as presentation is concerned.

So as far as PHP programming to being too technical, think again. You won’t know what you can do until you are upfront with the application itself. Once you do get upfront with it, don’t be surprised if you suddenly find yourself wanting to learn more about this line of programming. It will surely be an interesting journey into programming and development on your end.

PHP is considered to be one of the most popular server-side scripting systems on the web. And because of PHP’s popularity, a new generation of programmers who are familiar with PHP alone makes it possible to open a “command line interface” for PHP. Along with GUI functions support (Gtk or ncurses support), CLI or “command line interface” is a process of interacting with a computer by providing lines of text commands in written structure either from a keyboard input or from a script. This whole process of command line interface is considered to be a major step for PHP as it stands for its implementation as a genuine programming language.

PHP’s principal focus is server-side scripting which is a web server technology in that involves the process of running a script directly on the web server to create dynamic HTML pages thus fulfilling the user’s request. PHP is originally intended to generate dynamic web pages and its server-side scripting function is the same with other server-side scripting languages that offer dynamic content from a web server to a client, such as ASP.NET system of Microsoft, Sun Microsystems’s JavaServer Pages and mod perl. PHP attracted development of various frameworks (code library made for helping in software development) as well that give building blocks and a design structure to promote rapid application development (RAD).

There are five different categories of an error message that the PHP interpreter may fall into:
PARSE ERROR: usually problems with the syntax of the program. This includes forgetting to place a semi-colon by the end of a statement. The interpreter will stop running when it encounters a parse error.
FATAL ERROR: this means a severe problem with the program content. Like in a parse error, the interpreter will also stop running when encountering a fatal error.
WARNING: an advisory that the interpreter gives whenever there is something fishy in your program. But unlike the first two errors, the interpreter will still keep on running.
NOTICE: this is a tip from the PHP interpreter.

Variables are used to temporarily keep or store something that you want to save. When the time comes that you will be needing them, recall the variables and they will give you the information that you stored for you to change, delete or edit it.

$message = "Hello Haroon";
echo "PHP Tutorial";
echo $message;
?>

‘Hello Haroon’ is the information that you want to save temporarily, while the message ‘PHP Tutorial’ is displayed.

The output of the program will be: PHP TutorialHello Haroon

In PHP, $ is used to define a variable. PHP, unlike C or Java, is a loose-typing scripting language.

No bug spray can get rid of the many programming bugs that are detected by the parser as you compile the program to come up with the final product. As any programmer knows, program bugs are as sure as the existence of and energy drink by their side, and though most of them may be the result of simple typo’s and other naming problems one can be assured of an unusual one that defies all your efforts and phone calls to buddies. What do you do? Ask the community of course, through the PHP Bugs site where they are compiled as reference for all who use PHP. Read the rest of this entry »

PHP developers and industry leaders are holding this year’s Testfest 2009 in a few months to get people all over the globe to test and review the current RC for approval and review pending full release. Such public or community testing is standard of the many open-source developers who help each other to test out new features and past problems if they were addressed or not. Many of the detected errors would be addressed in the subsequent Full Release. The open-sourced community is made up of leading programmers, developer groups and even companies, all of which work together during testfest. Read the rest of this entry »

Or so they say, with them releasing the software development kit (SDK) for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud services platform. maybe they’ve wised up and have accepted they cannot stand alone in the fast evolving internet and computing industry, most of which have long shifted to open sourced platforms for their web needs. The SDK includes code samples and tools for developers so they can work with Silverlight and IE8, the next generation of browser they have for the long Internet Explorer line. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s only been awhile since PHP 5.2.8 was out and it’s in with the new and out with the old once more:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 50 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

The new PHP 5.2.9 has the following fixes and security enhancements:

* Fixed the security issue in imagerotate(), where the background colour is not correctly validated with a non true colour image.
* Fixed a crash regarding extracting in zip when files or directories’ entry names have a relative path.
* Fixed explode() behavior with an empty string that respects the negative limit.
* Fixed a segfault when malformed string is passed on to json_decode().

For more information, you can read more of the details of this latest PHP version here.

The internet is composed of many web sites with most written in PHP, some in python and many other sub languages which are based on other proprietary formats. The heavy use of PHP necessitates the issuance of frequent updates which addresses security issues and flaws that prevents hackers from getting access or control of vulnerable implementations of systems using PHP in Windows. Windows Being the most targeted Operating System makes it very vulnerable but thanks to the open nature of the web, any security flaws that are found are immediately found and announced getting the community on the hunt for an immediate solution.
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