PHP

I've been running CLI-based PHP scripts for scripting and more complex "applications" since the CLI was introduced back in PHP 4.3. As time has gone along, the applications have become more complex and varied. I only use some of these applications every few months, so it's easy to forget how to run the application without the guidance provided by a GUI.

For quite some time I've been looking for something along the lines of HyperCard whereby I can put together a simple GUI without too much work; however, this would be in the context of my existing PHP scripts.

Installing PHP-GTK

Installing recent (as of Nov 2009) versions of PHP-GTK seems to be a little tricky. If you want to have PHP-GTK, Glade support, and MySQL support, it looks like you need to download and merge THREE different downloads.

Xdebug (http://xdebug.org) is probably one of the best ways to debug PHP code. But Xdebug can be difficult to setup, depending on the environment.

If you want an one-liner to see defined variables, try this :

print print_r(array_keys(get_defined_vars()), 1);

If you only want to see a select list of PHP variables, try this which was lifted from the notes at http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-defined-vars.php.

    function getDefinedVars($varList, $excludeList) {
        $temp1 = array_values(array_diff(array_keys($varList), $excludeList));

Here are the slides to an interesting talk about PHP frameworks, given by the "first" creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, who now works for Yahoo.

In PHP 3.0+, Rasmus kind of gave up control of PHP to a couple other guys who took it in much more of a Object-oriented way. I like the following slides where Rasmus questions how 10 years of OO haven't added much (except confusion) to the language :

http://talks.php.net/show/drupal08/4 PHP 1995 - short and simple
http://talks.php.net/show/drupal08/5 PHP 2005 - after 10 years of OO cruft added

A friend thought that updating to the latest version of PHP would "automatically" provide much better security. I'm skeptical.

I've heard that most of the "unintentional" PHP security issues over the past 2-3 years were only a risk if you were accessing PHP from the local file system (not via Apache). If somebody's already on your filesystem you're going to have problems regardless of the PHP version.