The Ways To Be Good PHP web Application Developer Part 2

In first part, we came to know that good coding practices matters more for ourselves as well as for other PHP developers who might have revisit your code during maintenance or in redesigning of website or web application. We know write code in clean and compact manner save our and others time and efforts much as well as your code become futuristic. Moreover, writing comprehensive code facilitates debugging and other changes during and after the web development project.

 Now in this part I would like to tell you some different things from the coding practices. I would like to advise you to be simple as possible as so anyone can understand your project and get his or her solutions. If you are scrappy to include all new things you learn, you might be ending in a complex, but super sweet solution that won’t offer any benefits to your clients so it is mandatory to restrict yourself up to your aims and not complicate problem further.

The same thing happens when you predict yourself as an expert and try to show your expertness in coding by making it much complex and hard to understand. In due course, you may forget one thing that you always like to work on the project developed by other when you find it easy to understand and modify therefore, making others task difficult may annoy others and harm your client at the end. Moreover, there are chances that you have to revisit your own super complex code after some intervals and you might have forgot that what you have written and why so you put yourself in to a big trouble in debugging or redesigning your PHP development project.

Finally, I would like to advice that you need to share your code with your fellow PHP web Application developer or your PHP developer friends in the community. This not only will sharpen your coding but also offers others to get or learn something from you and this way you will pay back when you have gain from the community when you were in the learning process at the initial stage of your PHP developer career.

Conclusion

If you want to be a good PHP developer you should have good coding practices where you have to always think about the other PHP developers who might have to dive in your documents in order to maintenance or redesign of the PHP project. Writing good code and sharing it with others may give you more credit and learning experiences than you think.

PHP MySQL Development—Scaling the Application Part 3

In previous parts, we have revisited some performance, scalability, and PHP tuning related issues and not in this part of PHP MySQL development series, which is broadly focusing on the scalability of web application we will try to discuss some important aspects of load balancing.

During our PHP MySQL development we create we application with massive data and tons of interactivities between the dynamic application and end users. These all definitely lead to exert loads on the server, which has to manage all requests all the time forth and back. It is good thing that we start with a single server to handle these all sorts of loads on the dispatch as well as in order to run the web application smoothly on each client.

Another important thing is that you need to scale the web application in order to manage extra traffic or some more traffic each time you come up with some fresh initiatives. Now, in such scenario, single server is not capable to manage heavy load all the time and we need to take help of multiple servers. Technically, we can’t connect multiple servers directly with the web application or can’t split them without any intermediary server with appropriate software and hardware.

This intermediary server acts as the load-balancing server and allocates traffic judiciously to the other multiple servers with different software and hardware. Here PHP is ideal web development language to do horizontal scaling. You need not to worry about the numbers of servers you add in load-balancing server. The obvious role of load-balancing server is to provide central point to manage all incoming requests and dispatching them to the appropriate server and then again redirecting the responses from the corresponding servers to the end users in a highly synchronous manner.

There are two kids of load-balancers. The first one is software load-balancers and second is hardware load-balancers. These software balancers are install on Linux bases machines in most of the cases and have their own peculiarities in terms of built in page output caching, some gzip type of compression and other many things we need in a modern server. The big fishes are Apache, Nginx and Squid like software to do effective load balancing. If you can’t afford big brands you have Perlbal like cheaper software to help you out for small to medium projects.

The second part is of hardware load balancers that have some custom built software to manage the various hardware counterparts of the load-balancing software. In present market, Citrix Netscaler and F5 BigIP are well-known versions of the hardware load-balancers and server as good security barriers or firewalls for your web application.

Today Cloud computing is serving as new dimension in the load balancing, but here you have some distinct benefits despite their software only nature. Those benefits are coming from the unique in-built mechanisms of handling load balance across the all-existing instances. Although, cloud base load-balancers are stiff means shows less flexibility, but superb in terms of easy setup and their maintenance in cost effective manners.

In short, if you need good solution for load balancing you need to monitor the ability of manipulation or making caching of the data across the servers and sort out the most appropriate solution for you.

Conclustion

We all know that most of our PHP MySQL web application development suffering from load-balancing problems when question of scaling of web application arises. Thus, finding hardware that is more suitable or software base solution is the need of the present hour. We have many software and hardware as well as Cloud based load-balancers in the market so we need to be careful in selection.

We Can’t Satisfy All End-Users with Our Designs

Summary

Since, client satisfaction is easy where we have to deal with only some persons, but we can’t give guarantee of total satisfaction with our PHP web designs for their targeted audiences. We can’t create generic purpose web designs offering greater satisfaction to the all stake holders. We only satisfy some niche audience and some percentage of general audience with our PHP web designing endeavors.

Introduction

In our web development community particularly PHP development, it is general trends to look at the portfolio and find out the relevant project that PHP developer had done in past and match it with our concept or business requirements. Once things set okay, we handover our PHP web development project to that PHP web development company or freelancer PHP developer.

At PHP web developer point of view this behavior directly force us to satisfy the clients by judging their requirements, likes, dislikes and some business related issues. In verbose we say client-centric approach gracefully. Yes, that is easy to satisfy one-single entity, be it a person or a business by keen observations and experienced assumptions. Nevertheless, true difficulty start when our pure intentions to add some value in the business of the client or her personal endeavors where her target audience and their satisfactions matter more than her personal.

In this sense, if we look at closely to each project we encounter, we definitely find them unique in that sense that we have to satisfy different persons or audience each time and not a single project is alike to any other one. Thus, it is insane to comparing existing projects in the portfolio with our concept or our business requirements, rather we only tell that we are belong to the same niche by referring a project or a group of projects as reference.

Therefore, at web developers side no client is similar in needs than others so their projects. With this knowledge, we have to go for the target audience research every time we take new project on the hand, despite it belongs to the same category or niche. We need carefully listen to our client without mentioning that we have done similar projects before and will implement same things in your project too. Once we sort the needs of clients, we need to try to understand its target actual audience under the umbrella of that needs.

There are altogether different ways to reach at the different kind of targeted audiences for various kinds of project and no same methodologies or tricks will work in each case. If you are not assure of any method, please run a guerilla survey or user experience test of your product/software that ultimately will give you insight about it.

Now, if we are talking about the target audience here we can’t satisfy the all related people or groups with our designs so your guerilla survey may not be accurate all the time since it comprises only limited audience. If want to give guaranteed satisfaction we only can mention some percentage of our targeted audience, never 100% as a whole.

Role of Composer in CakePHP Web Development

Summary

Installing CakePHP instantly is the demand of the day in CakePHP developer community and composer can assists us a lot. We can manage multiple versions, plugins, and straight installation without the knowledge of complicated configurations with the help of composer.

Introduction

Generally, composer is consider as a package manager for PHP and good friend of PHP web developers in many ways. Nevertheless, this is not true at technical point of view because composer deals with packages or libraries but it manage them on per project basis, not anything globally. Moreover, it is installing packages in a directory inside your project. Thus, we can say that is truly a dependency manager, not a packages manager though it has inspired by node’s npm and ruby’s bundler (package managers).

In CakePHP development composer is helping us directly where our all CakePHP development projects are depending on the numbers of libraries. The real intricacy is that these libraries are again depending on the other libraries. Therefore, finding the things you depend on from such multiple stack is nothing but searching a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, composer can find out which version of which packages need to be installed ASAP, and it does that immediately for you.

At present, we won’t dive in coding part of composer but we will explore its capacities to manage CakePHP installation beautifully without any hurdle and wastage of time. Yes, it is true that composer can help us to install CakePHP, plugins and other vendor libraries. If we think only about the installation of CakePHP, we can say that we have two kinds of CakePHP developers who need the ultimate help of composer. The first group is consists of new developers who are not much familiar with command line setup and doesn’t know how to configure CakePHP installation righteously. Another group is of advance users who want to use CakePHP within next five minutes to start a project of a big clientele and using latest complicated configuration.

Fortunately, composer can help both groups to do things their own ways. In addition to these, composer solves our highly complicated problems related to multiple version installation. Using PEAR is a bit difficult without its advance knowledge. Therefore, depending on composer is the best idea for many seasoned CakePHP programmers too.

You can use composer along with PEAR packages where installing and managing plugins, vendor libraries, etc. far easier than we think. Let me tell that composer/installers can beautifully handles CakePHP plugins as well as can provide easy access to the robust external libraries of CakePHP.

Make Your Website More Secure By Secure PHP Programming Practices Part-1

Summary

Due to have, a big developer community PHP is suffering from the security related issues a lot. Therefore, it is advisable to use secure coding practices for all sort of PHP developments and save your website from the plenty of vulnerability. There are user input data checking system and keeping off the error reporting are among the most desirable security aspects.

Introduction

Among all the programming languages, PHP is the easiest one to learn and start coding if you have any programming background or not. You simply need some basic HTML coding knowledge and some ideas about the syntax of programming at basic level, and of course, plenty of learning stuff at your side, you can start website development or edit your existing site in order to add some interactive and dynamic pages.

At the flip side, coding done by a fresher or inexperienced programmers may prove their website vulnerable to malicious attacks or some security breaches. If you want to save your website from such vulnerability, you should know some rules of secure PHP development or coding practices. Therefore, in this series I would like to introduce you to some valuable tips and rules to do secure PHP programming.

Validate User Data

The first rule is to create a system that can check and prevent your website from the data input done by all the users of your website, without any exception. If you think your website is useless for hackers and don’t have any chances to have malicious user. You might going in wrong because if there is no bad intended user come on your site, but your good users can commit some mistakes that may cost you dearly.

Therefore, it is advisable to check each data entered or action done through effective security measures. Here simple client-side validations using some JavaScript like weak measure won’t work and you need some strong measures to avoid further security breaches. Thus, trusting any user is insane act at security point of view.

 Turn Off Error Messages

 For a PHP web developer error message is life line to get insight about the development and mistakes she had committed before. Therefore, we are keeping error messaging system turn on always during our PHP web development environment. That is good, but worst for a live website as it can handover all clues and information regarding to your code, documents and databases as well as related web applications in directly. Therefore, it is advisable that you set “error_reporting” to ‘0’ value in ,htaccess or php.ini files in source code.

PHP MySQL Development—Scaling the Application Part 2

In part one, we have grasped the idea of inter relationships between performance and scalability and further explore the role of PHP to fine-tune these parameter through opcode cache. Basically, opcode cache sits in between the PHP and server machine. Since PHP recompiles code upon each request and this takes time and resources. Therefore, opcode cache remembers the first compiled version and serve that in future request without reinventing wheel again.

Apart from this, there are various opcode caches available in the market. Fortunately, Zend server has one that is in-built whilst Microsoft is providing WinCache on proprietary platform. In opensource, area has APC as a big name. However, the installation of these products during PHP MySQL programming are easy and straightforward process. By using these products, you can gain instant and considerable performance improvements hence scalability.

It is well verse that PHP is dynamic language and generating dynamic pages that any user can change at any moment. It is general perception that dynamic pages constantly or frequently changing, but in reality, most of the dynamic pages hardly exhibit any change once they are generated. For instance FAQ page or a press release which are not changing, but in background PHP is working and CPU cycles are consuming resources to keep its process.

If we PHP MySQL developers really wish to save some we need to remove the dynamic nature of such pages so we can stop the background processes and unwanted client server interactions thus lots of CPU processes. There are several ways out to do these tasks and one of them is pre-generate HTML pages from the PHP and have to serve those pages directly to the users. Here we will experience a drawback if some changes happen to those pages it will reflect on delayed schedules, not in real-time.

Another way is to approach this problem is to implement on-the-fly cache. In this sort of PHP MySQL development entire script output is captured in to the buffer in form of file system or in to the memory in form of cache or in the database like MySQL. Whenever future requests occur that script will read from the cached copy and prevent the entire dynamic reading and delivery process saving time and processing power hence lots improvement in performance and scaling. With jpcache you can manage such processes while with Smarty templates you can get done automatically.

Conclusion :-

When performance and scaling of application are concern PHP is offering some distinctive advantages being a dynamic language of modern era. We have several mechanisms to combat with this problem and opcode cache is one of them. Same the way we can improve performance by removing the dynamic nature of nearly static pages generated by PHP.

Precautions Before Deploying PHP Application In PHP Development part 2

PHP is famous for its dynamic and interactive nature therefore, it may generate pages that let users to create their own usernames and passwords so PHP developers are using encryption methods to encrypt password before submission of forms field entry to the database field. Before sometime ago PHP web application programmers were using Message Digest Algorithm (MD5) function to encrypt the password into 128-bit string, but it was not sufficient against the modern attackers with modern technologies. Now most of the PHP website developers are using Secure Has Algorithm) SHA-1 function to create 160-bit string that is more secure than previous one.

In usual cases php.ini file consists of a setting termed as “register_globals” that means if this setting is on the server will create automatic global variables for many of the server’s variables and query strings. This is a big loophole in the security of the application. Therefore, many third party packages like CMS software, Joomla, Drupal etc. are demanding users to set register_globals off so automatic global variable generation stops and unauthorized users can’t access any sensitive data just guessing the name of the variable that validate the password. Thus, a smart PHP developer will set register_globals off in case of security issues.

We most of PHP web programmers are lazy at a point or sometime we are hard press to accomplish our task rapidly so client can reach at market earlier than her competitors we avoid thorough coding and good coding practices. Among these good practices giving the value to the variables which are validating the authentication process. Here value instantiation is important before the log-in procedure starts. If value installation is done we can prevent users from bypassing the verification process and get easy access to the protected areas which are not included in their access privileges. Moreover, value instantiation process block the users to start new sessions on an application, but some security issues remain their intact.

Conclusion :-

PHP is highly flexible web development language and this flexibility causes many problems as far as security is concern. In due course if we take some precautions before deploying PHP application we can save future damages with least efforts.

Precautions Before Deploying PHP Application In PHP Development part 1

PHP is not new web development language so it is insane to say that its security measures are not adequate. Though it is highly flexible language its back-to-back versions have gotten lots of improvements in sense of security measures. Since PHP development has yielded myriads of websites for the web it is likely that the PHP developers who are working on PHP web development might have not enough knowledge of have good coding practices that ensure the enough coding steps to beat the malicious attackers. Therefore, today we will explore the precautions before deploying PHP application at a glance.

In many cases PHP programmers have to installed some sorts of PHP scripts from the 3^rd party applications since PHP is flexible enough to allow all sorts of integrations. In due course, PHP developers save setup scripts on the working directories and this script allows working components installation also allows the access for the malicious users. Perhaps due to this reason all third party packages providers give instructions to remove the setup scripts immediately accomplishment of installation process. This is good way to save our PHP application from the unscrupulous users.

If any PHP web programmer wishes to keep that script she used to create an .htaccess file to control the administration directories. This way if any unauthorized user attempts to access the protected directories has to pass through the validation process giving username and passward that stored in the password file. Something similar may happens in case of ‘include’ file which we   use in many parts of the PHP application. This is called include file because it has directives that assimilate the code of individual file into that of originating page. If your include file is simple than no problem but if consists of some sensitive data like usernames and passwords or some database access keys we have take enough care to prevent that and there is only secure way that you should remove the .inc extension and convert it into .php extension so PHP engines will process the file and prevent unauthorized access.

Conclusion :-

PHP is highly flexible web development language and this flexibility causes many problems as far as security is concern. In due course if we take some precautions before deploying PHP application we can save future damages with least efforts.

CakePHP Development for CMS

Among the plenty of PHP frameworks CakePHP applaud the most by web developers as well as clients for its performance and cost-effectiveness. However, when you go for CakePHP development you have to face some difficulties if your project is big with lots of features and you have to take help of Zend framework, but this happens in very rare cases since the majority of PHP web development projects come from medium and small businesses and CakePHP web development is the best option for them.

Another class of users who also can get benefits of CakePHP programming is the content management system users and they are of plenty of types so if we consider this vast user base CakePHP website development has bright future. Therefore, let’s exploit the contribution of CakePHP web app development in creation of excellent CMS.

There is a free CMS that is the product of CakePHP web programming and it is OvenCMS. In this CakePHP programming CakePHP developers have used jQuery and JavaScript libraries so this CMS is fantastic and most suitable for small websites. It has extensive plug-ins so we can extend its functionality further. The same product is Wildflower and also for free.

If you think of internationalization and want to add multilingual CMS you have best option and that is Croogo this CMS is developed by CakePHP developers using MVC framework so you can use it extensively for blog, node and page. Moreover, you can categories content with Taxonomy and use its WYSIWG editor to do your work rapidly and accurately without any coding.

If you are going to create lightweight CMS using CakePHP web apps programming your product will be like CupCake CMS that is design oriented and for quick deployment. This is a product for small to medium sites with user-friendly interface.

If your clients require fat and versatile CMS with your CakePHP development you can go for Termite CMS so your clients will handle multiple websites. If you want to handle portfolio sites Simpleflan is solution of CakePHP programming in CakePHP 1.2 with clean and functional interface.

If you look for effective and modern programming your Cake PHP web developers should have knowledge of creating Cherryfish like CMS that is a modular CMS and using ExtJS.

Conclusion :-

Demand of various level of CMS is high and CakePHP development companies are getting many inquiries in this regard so here we have taken a brief reviews of CakePHP based CMS used for various needs.

Custom PHP Application—Quickly Modify PHP setting

Many times we require some tweaks in the PHP setting particularly during custom PHP application development and in most cases we do that by modifying the .htacees file but when PHP is running in CGI module we can do that and we have to take another route to make PHP setting. At this juncture php.ini files can help you but there is a big restriction that php.ini files only work on a per folder basis, so in other words if we want to make any modification in PHP setting during  custom PHP application development we have to decide where we want to apply modification and in which folders then you have to place a separate php.ini files in each folder.

That is good that you need to make modification in a few countable folders so you can manually place the php.ini files in each folder but what about for a big custom PHP application development project where modification is essential in numbers of folders and if go through manual placements you can’t place such vast numbers of files in their respective folders so we have to take help of some automated  scrip that allows you make modification in such large numbers of folders. Luckily we have a workaround and that can be applied on most of the applications.

Here you need not to copy php.ini files recursively but you can specify the needed value only once. This magic can happens when you allow remote file inclusion with a PHP setting like allow_url_include and you have probabilities of two ways, one you can specify it in may php.ini files in all needed directories and second is that you have to specify it in the main configuration.php file with a function ini_set and this configuration file would be included in your PHP application so it affect the all directories at a time in custom PHP application development.