Sailesh's Journal
PHP to Leadership: Since 2008

Apache serves the most pages With Linux hosting comes the common use of the Apache web server. It’s by far the most deployed web server on the Internet with a 58.7% market share ( Netcraft ), so it’s only natural that it would also be used by a majority of the sites in the survey. However, even though it’s the behemoth in the web server market, Apache is slowly losing ground to competing platforms such as Microsoft’s IIS and up-and-comers like Lighttpd, at least according to data from companies such as Port 80 and Netcraft. MySQL dominates the databases With open source ruling the game it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the database of choice for all but one of the sites is MySQL , the ultra-popular Swedish open-source database. “The features that you get for free on MySQL, with replication, in-memory and fault-tolerant databases (if using MySQL cluster), transaction support, and the wicked performance, cost thousands of dollars with other database engines,” says Joseph Kottke, direc...

December 7th, 2007 by Pingdom Today we enjoy websites that are full of content and services that let us take care of anything imaginable online (well, almost). But the ride to our “Web 2.0” world of today has taken quite a while. It has been about 14 years since the first web page with dynamic content was created. This is a look at the history of the dynamic web, especially the server-side programming languages and frameworks that make it all possible. From static to dynamic When the Web first started, there were only static HTML pages. The internet had been around for some time already, but it was only after the introduction of HTML (and with it, web browsers) that what we call the World-Wide Web got started. A lot has happened since then. We would like to place the birth of the dynamic web to when CGI, Common Gateway Interface, was first introduced in 1993, 14 years ago. CGI was a way to let a website run scripts (usually Perl scripts back then) on the web server and display the o...

By Elizabeth Fulghum Anyone who has designed web sites for any length of time knows the limitations of html and other client side languages like CSS and JavaScript. While these languages remain at the core of web development, their primary function is to control how text and graphics are presented. Because they lack the ability to manipulate information on demand, or communicate with web servers, the result is a static web page. The ability to create dynamic pages opens doors. Suppose you wanted to create a survey to collect information from visitors to your web site. You could easily create a form with HTML that included all your questions, and have the results emailed to you. But to convert the raw information into a meaningful format, you'd have to manually compile it, and then organize it to gauge the results - a process which could take hours. Fortunately for you, using scripting, there are easier ways to collect and evaluate the results of the survey, or any form. Rather ...

By JT Smith on June 11, 2002 (8:00:00 AM) With a faltering economy forcing companies to cut spending whenever possible, less expensive and freely available Open Source software solutions may be gaining in popularity. Those wanting proof can look no further to PHP taking the top server-side scripting spot in a recent Internet host survey. In April 2002, Netcraft's monthly Web server survey revealed that 24 percent, or around 9 million of the 37 million sites it surveyed, were using Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) for a server side scripting language. For the first time, an Open Source scripting solution had passed Microsoft's proprietary Active Server Pages scripting to claim the top spot on the Netcraft survey. For both the April and May Netcraft surveys, PHP and ASP were almost too close to call, with Microsoft's product offering coming in just a hair under 24 percent of all hosts running a server-side script...

Intro to Php Security This article has reference to the PHP meet up in 2007 and the presentation by Dave Ross discussing security issues and options related to PHP programming. It begins by outlining common attack vectors like validation circumvention, code injection, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting. It then provides examples of each attack and recommendations for preventing them, such as validating all user input and escaping special characters when outputting data. The document also introduces tools for analyzing PHP code security like PHPSecAudit and browser developer toolbars. It emphasizes the importance of securing applications from the beginning rather than as an afterthought. Click on the below image to go to the actual presentation.

flickr's architecture & php View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: flickr architecture )

Federico Feroldi: PHP in Yahoo! View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: php yahoo )

PHP Security View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: php security )

by Derek Sivers SUMMARY: I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom . INTRO / BACKGROUND: Back in January 2005, I announced on the O’Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby (cdbaby.com) website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch. I hired one of the best Rails programmers in the world (Jeremy Kemper aka bitsweat), and we set off on this huge task with intensity. The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do. But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It’s do-able with a lot of glue. But it’s damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you’re really d...