Software Engineering

How to check if the correct PHP version, the correct modules and other stuff are available, when you’re creating a PHP application, you expect other to use. Show me

With the amazing buzz around RubyonRails, everyone seems to be hooked on the Model-View-Controller (or just MVC) paradigm – and do strive to mindlessly implement the ”Ruby way” into other programming languages without too much reflection and thoughts on how to do it. . Even tough most of the efforts I’ve seen so far seem pretty hopeless; I do believe you could actually do something good with MVC and PHP. Let me try to tell you how.

I usually edit more code others made, than I create new files, and while most of the code is in PHP, there’s a huge difference in the coding style applied by different developers, and some styles are much more annoying than others. I do respect that people are different and that is probably more efficient to allow for some degree of personal style than to try to enforce a single common style.

When you’re validating data – either client- or serverside – there are basically two strategies you can choose between. You can either blacklist data or white list data. Blacklisting seems to be the most popular way to validate data, but white listing is so much better. Here’s a brief description of the two strategies and why the white listing is better. The black listing strategy is validating you input against a list of characters which are illegal in the input.

It seems most developers has listen too much to the principle of “don’t repeat yourself”, and so otherwise bright developers in some cases strive too much to avoid repeating themselves and makes a mess of their systems but avoids repetitions completely. If your developer and reads about the DRY, do also remember the important step one: Think. I’m basically all for DRY. Endless repetitions of the same lines of codes is a pretty bad idea and should be avoided.