php[architect] magazine has republished an article from their January 2018 issue by Jeremy Dorn that covers PHP sessions in-depth.

HP Sessions are often taken for granted. A session is a magic array which persists across page loads and holds user-specific data. It’s a fantastic and integral part of most web applications. But when misused, sessions can cause substantial security holes, performance and scalability problems, and data corruption. A deep understanding of sessions is vital to production web development in PHP.

The article covers various topics around PHP sessions and their use including security, performance and scalability. It also covers a few additional topics like serialization of data, session locking and intelligent auto-merging of sessions on the backend. Check out the full article for descriptions of each and some code examples to help show them in action.

Anna Filina has posted her own addendum to a top ten list of common PHP programmer mistakes, adding seven more of her own.

I was recently asked by one of my readers to give feedback on the following article he read: 10 Most Common PHP Mistakes. It is well written and very thorough. Most of the tips are specific to PHP, others are about web programming in general or database performance. It’s a very good read. I was also asked to contribute to this list, so here are 7 more tips.

Her list of seven touches on topics like caching, allowing SQL injection, disabling error reporting and ignoring accessibility. She also includes some configuration settings, code and links to other tools/resources to help provide information on preventing these other mistakes.

Stuart Herbert has officially released a plugin for the popular text editor Sublime Text 2 to integrate PHPUnit support directly into the editing environment.

Sublime Text 2 is a new cross-platform text editor that I’ve recently switched to. It’s still in public beta, but already offers better performance (and battery life!) and a better look (fonts that render properly!) than Java-based IDEs such as Netbeans. One thing it didn’t have was support for PHPUnit, so I’ve made a plugin. It’s available to install via Package Control.

The plugin allows you to directly create tests for a class using a context menu's "Test This Class" option. You can also run the tests directly from the editor and use either the menu or direct text commands to control it. He's also gathering some other well-used PHP snippets into another related plugin, the Additional PHP Snippets plugin.

In this new post to the PHP 10.0 blog Stas mentions some of the other syntax options he's like to see in PHP including:

• a()() - When a() returns a callable object (such as a closure) the second set of brackets would call it.
• foo(1,2,,4) - Syntax to skip a parameter in a call, which then will be substituted with the default as defined by the function.
• $a = ["a", "b" => "c"]; - I’d really like to have short array syntax. Yes, I know it was rejected so many times already, but I still like it.

Be sure to catch some of the good amount of comments with options from others about Stas' suggestions.

Felix Geisendorfer has posted an announcement that the latest Release Candidate for the CakePHP has been released (another step closer to 1.2) - version 1.2RC1.

Sorry about the long delay. But CakePHP 1.2 RC1 is out and as sweet as it can be.

Updates in this release include over eight hundred commits, one hundred plus bug fixes and lots of new security features and additional functionality. Check out the Changelog for the updates or just grab your own Cake from the downloads section.

Continuing in their effort to help PHP developers keep their code bug-free, DevShed has posted part two of the series looking at unit testing your applications. Previously they had looked at the basics - of they work and what they're for. This time, they dig a little deeper, showing some of the additional features and conditions that PHPUnit has to offer.

This week, you will learn about running multiple tests simultaneously, creating more informative error messages, and more.

They get back into something they mentioned briefly before - packaging tests in a separate archive to keep it out of the main body of code (the same way separating content and display functionality is good). They also talk about how to run more than one test at the same time, a handy feature that lets you make regression tests.

They also show how to create more informative error messages and how to manually add more testing conditions for you to check custom bits of code that don't quite fit with the assertNull, assertEquals, and assertFalse crowd.

This article is an excerpt from the Sams Publishing book "Advanced PHP Programming" by George Schlossnagle.

Continuing in their effort to help PHP developers keep their code bug-free, DevShed has posted part two of the series looking at unit testing your applications. Previously they had looked at the basics - of they work and what they're for. This time, they dig a little deeper, showing some of the additional features and conditions that PHPUnit has to offer.

This week, you will learn about running multiple tests simultaneously, creating more informative error messages, and more.

They get back into something they mentioned briefly before - packaging tests in a separate archive to keep it out of the main body of code (the same way separating content and display functionality is good). They also talk about how to run more than one test at the same time, a handy feature that lets you make regression tests.

They also show how to create more informative error messages and how to manually add more testing conditions for you to check custom bits of code that don't quite fit with the assertNull, assertEquals, and assertFalse crowd.

This article is an excerpt from the Sams Publishing book "Advanced PHP Programming" by George Schlossnagle.

Zend has officially announced some additional keynote speakers for the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose:

Wanted to give you a heads up that today Zend, the PHP company, announced additional keynotes for this year's PHP Conference and Expo. The newly announced keynote speakers will join confirmed keynote speakers Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail" and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz, software designer and open source strategist, as well as Matthew Rechs, CTO of Schematic.

These new speakers are:

• David Berlind, Mashup Camp organizer and executive editor at ZDNet, will discuss the impact of "The Mashup Economy" and what it means for developers, corporations and consumers.
• Anant Jhingran, Distinguished Engineer, VP and CTO, Information Management of the IBM Software Group will present along with..
• ...Mike Smith, Distinguished Engineer, System i Software Chief Architect of the IBM Systems and Technology Group

There's still time to register for this great conference - you can get all the details from the main confernece site and signup today!

Zend has officially announced some additional keynote speakers for the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose:

Wanted to give you a heads up that today Zend, the PHP company, announced additional keynotes for this year's PHP Conference and Expo. The newly announced keynote speakers will join confirmed keynote speakers Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail" and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz, software designer and open source strategist, as well as Matthew Rechs, CTO of Schematic.

These new speakers are:

• David Berlind, Mashup Camp organizer and executive editor at ZDNet, will discuss the impact of "The Mashup Economy" and what it means for developers, corporations and consumers.
• Anant Jhingran, Distinguished Engineer, VP and CTO, Information Management of the IBM Software Group will present along with..
• ...Mike Smith, Distinguished Engineer, System i Software Chief Architect of the IBM Systems and Technology Group

There's still time to register for this great conference - you can get all the details from the main confernece site and signup today!

DevShed has posted part three of their popular "using mysqli in PHP5" series today, this time, they focus on increasing the functionality of the code they started last time with other mysqli methods.

I must say that the "mysqli" extension offers an impressive set of features, which can be implemented right from the very beginning. However, and speaking of its cool features, in the next few lines, I'm going to show you a few more. Over the course of this last tutorial, I'll be covering some other methods and properties, mainly aimed at finding the IDs after inserting new rows, and obtaining information about specific table fields.

They touch on the fetch_array, data_seek, fetch_assoc, fetch_field, and fetch_seek functions, giving examples and other assicated properties along the way.