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Survey says: PHP passes Microsoft Active Server Pages

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

PHP Code Review Guidelines

General  The code works  The code is easy to understand  Follows coding conventions  Names are simple and if possible short  Names are spelt correctly  Names contain units where applicable  There are no usages of magic numbers  No hard coded constants that could possibly change in the future  All variables are in the smallest scope possible  There is no commented out code  There is no dead code (inaccessible at Runtime)  No code that can be replaced with library functions  Variables are not accidentally used with null values  Variables are immutable where possible  Code is not repeated or duplicated  There is an else block for every if clause even if it is empty  No complex/long boolean expressions  No negatively named boolean variables  No empty blocks of code  Ideal data structures are used  Constructors do not accept null/none values  Catch clauses are fine grained and catch specific exceptions  Exceptions are not eaten if caught, unless explicitly documente

Security: Password Hashing

In this article I'm going to cover password hashing, a subject which is often poorly understood by newer developers. Recently I've been asked to look at several web applications which all had the same security issue - user profiles stored in a database with plain text passwords. Password hashing is a way of encrypting a password before it's stored so that if your database gets into the wrong hands, the damage is limited. Hashing is nothing new - it's been in use in Unix system password files since long before my time, and quite probably in other systems long before that. In this article I'll explain what a hash is, why you want to use them instead of storing real passwords in your applications, and give you some examples of how to implement password hashing in PHP and MySQL. Foreword As you read on you'll see that I advocate the use of a hashing algorithm called Secure Hashing Algorithm 1 (or SHA-1). Since I wrote this article, a team of researcher