Yesterday, the PHP community proudly announced that they have released PHP 5.3. While only the minor version number went up, this is still a significant release containing many new features. Maybe even more important than these new features are several features that have been deprecated. These are features that have been in PHP for legacy reasons, but best practices generally already advised against using them, and now the fea... read more »

As PHP developers download and start testing the biggest change to the language in 7 years, many are wondering not about Santa’s bag full of new toys for them to use in building tomorrow’s applications but about the changes in the language that will affect yesterday’s applications.

The good news is that if you’ve been keeping your applications current with the language and best practices, there are very few things that could affect you. The bad news is that... read more »

From the list of tutorials on Day One of DPC 2009, I chose to sit-in on Stefan Esser's Security Crash Course with the idea that it would be a good opportunity for a review. When he displayed one of his introductory slides about the topics he would be covering, there seemed to be no surprises: input filtering, XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, session management and PHP code inclusion and evaluation -- it was a fairly expected list of all those things in an application that can threaten at ... read more »

Part of the mandate for the PHP Center for Expertise inside of Ibuildings is an ongoing series of Business Process Re-Engineering projects. The first of these projects, "Estimating Best Practices", was recently completed and released. It contains the collected best practices from estimators inside Ibuildings, as well as input from external experts and published works.

Our estimating team spent two months thinking and discussing how software companies create estimates; we discus... read more »