How to Be an Above Average PHP Code Jockey
An Overview of PHP Programming Best Practices

By Nathan A. Good

From hobbyists to full-blown enterprise projects, any or all code can benefi t from good documentation, thorough unit testing, and adherence to the prevalent coding conventions used in PHP. The rewards of introducing documentation, testing, and adherence to standards in your code will not be immediately apparent to end-users. Since they do not immediately see a tangible difference, it may be difficult for them to understand why you are spending time implementing documentation and unit tests and refactoring code to match conventions. On the other hand, you may be working in an environment where your sponsors understand the importance of best practices such as unit tests and may require you write them. This article is indented to give you a solid introduction to these concepts if you are new to them. It can also act as a quick reference and review to you if you are already using phpDocumentor and PhpUnit with your PHP code.[Read More]

PHP From the Shop Floor
Using PHP and Agile Development for Medical Management Software

By Elizabeth Naramore

Many of those who are tapped in to the Agile way of software development think this practice can only be applied to something like Ruby on Rails. This issue showcases a perfect example of a forward-thinking software company who is using Agile methodology in their PHP development to produce complex medical management software.[Read More]

Good Things Come In Small Packages
Harnessing the PHP and SQLite Combo

By W. Jason Gilmore

Sporting a footprint of less than 250KB and requiring minimal administration, SQLite is a tiny database engine that packs a powerful punch. This article showcases this surprisingly capable database, and PHP’s ability to interface with it to create robust data-driven Web applications.[Read More]

Building a Simple AJAX Application
Learning to use AJAX together with PHP

By Thomas Myer

AJAX can be a bit daunting for those used to doing things the old-fashioned, pre-Web 2.0 way. This article is a gentle introduction.[Read More]

MySQL – Now with More XML Goodness
MySQL 5.1’s New XPath Functions

By Jon Stephens

Recent MySQL development has seen lots of new features being pushed out so quickly that it seems you could blink and miss some of them. This month's focus is on a couple of new XPath-related functions that were implemented in version 5.1.5.[Read More]

Optimizing PHP
Tips to Speed Up Real World Applications

By Michael Kimsal

PHP is a relatively fast executing language. For most applications, it runs just fine. However, sometimes a site owner needs an application to run as fast as possible. Caches like APC and Zend often offer dramatic improvements. This article aims to highlight a few ways to improve raw code performance, which could be further enhanced by an opcode cache if desired.[Read More]