PHP

Log files may very well be one of the most underestimated and underutilized tools at a developer's disposal. Beyond their value for debugging, with a bit of creativity and forethought, logs files can be leveraged to serve as a valuable source of usage information and analytics. In this article, In this article, Toptal engineer Ilya Sanosyan provides a practical guide to maximizing the value we get from our logs.

Laravel designers didn't spend too much time reinventing the wheel. A lot of solutions and practices are transferred from other frameworks. The decision to embrace a new PHP framework should not be taken lightly, so let's examine why considering Laravel may be worth your time and effort. Toptal freelance software engineer Alex Rytov explains what made him take the plunge and why he believes Laravel has a bright future.

CakePHP is an amazing PHP framework, but it has a steep learning curve! It requires a good amount of research and training to become an expert. This article describes few bad practices when writing a CakePHP code, and proposes the correct approach to avoid them.

The Cake development team considers CakePHP 3 to be a game changer. With the alpha version of CakePHP 3 now hot out of the oven, this article takes a fresh look at CakePHP as an effective modern framework for PHP development.

PHP makes it relatively easy to build a web-based system, which is much of the reason for its popularity. But its ease of use notwithstanding, PHP has evolved into quite a sophisticated language, with many nuances and subtleties that can bite developers, leading to hours of hair-pulling debugging. This article highlights ten of the more common mistakes that PHP developers need to beware of.

Once you step beyond the comfortable confines of English-only character sets, you quickly find yourself entangled in the wonderfully wacky world of UTF-8. Indeed, navigating through UTF-8 related issues can be a frustrating and hair-pulling experience. This post provides a concise cookbook for addressing these issues when working with PHP and MySQL in particular, based on practical experience and lessons learned.

I live in Córdoba, Argentina, approximately 130 kilometers (~80 miles) away from the lake where I kitesurf. Thats roughly a two-hour drive, which I can deal with. But I can't deal with the fact that weather forecasts are inaccurate. And where I live, good wind conditions last just a couple of hours. The last thing you want to do is clear up your Monday schedule to go kitesurfing and find yourself cursing the gods on a windless lake after two hours of driving. I needed to know the wind conditions of my favorite kitesurfing spot—in real time. So I decided to build my own weather station.

Everyone has their own set of tools. As a PHP developer, one of my favorites is a Rapid Application Development framework called “Nooku”. In the words of the development group: “Nooku is more of a web development toolkit than a framework” In case you are not familiar with it, have a look. It’s an open source project that makes heavy use of industry accepted design patterns to produce highly componentized applications that are easily extensible and reusable (initially created by one of the lead Joomla developers). Out of the box, Nooku gives you a great deal to help get projects off the ground faster. A small, but strong sample: