Linde002::PHP

I was wandering around the exhibit hall and started talking with one of the reps from appcelerator and he explained to me what it did. Well, in short… It kicks ass.

The long version though, is that it changes the developmentparadigm from functional programming to declarative programming, a short example is creating a calendar with HTML. We normall create a html table  or a div structure and if we want to make it interactive we add a lot of javascript. What Appcelerator does is  that is uses it’s own XML namespace and allows you to ‘declare’ a calendar widget like
<app:calendar opt1='apple' opt2='pear'/>
which is pretty cool.

Another cool feature is that they’ve created a client side messaging bus that interacts with their custom event model. This might work out to something like this:
<a on="click then activatedSignal"/>
And every widget that has subscribed to the ‘activatedSignal’ event can respond. This looks something like this:
<app:calendar on="activatedSignal then display:hidden"/>

It does alot more cool things and it’s free! so go check it out.

After flunking my Zend Framework Certification exam (d’oh!) I moved on to Stefan Essers’ talk about the lesser known security problems in PHP applications. There were a lot of problems that I’d never even heard about and that result from the way PHP works internally.

One of these was the fact that PHP_SELF is not url-encoded and the encoding of REQUEST_URI depends on the client. If your application depends on one of these variables you could be exposed to cross site scripting attacks. Another cool thing I didn’t know was that firefox 2 allowed the setting of cookies that were valid for entire TLD’s. So for example you could set a cookie with logged_in=true for *.nl and every site that would check authorization this way (which they shouldn’t) and had a .nl domain would be vulnerable.

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The opening keynote today was given by the guys from Varien which is to Magento what Zend is to PHP. Even though it was quite a commercial talk there were a couple of intersting highlights.

Firstly, the fact that they’d built their entire eCommerce framework with Zend Framework and built it fast. We’re talking about a huge codebase that can do almost anything you’d ever want your eCommerce site to do, and some things you don’t want. And they did it in 9 months.

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The welcoming party was last night in the exhibit hall and as is the norm for these parties there are a lot of goodies to be found, and I do not mean the free beer or food (which was good). I had some nice talks with some of the exhibitors, got asked to come work in the US at least three times and filled my booty with goodies. The best goodie was the remote controlled minicar from Sybase who happen to have an interesting product as well.

They released version 11 of their database and this version has syncing possibilities with MySQL. This combined with the ability to run the sybase database on your blackberry with a footprint of only 700kb makes for some interesting possibilities.

Chatski foto’s later