PHP

Developers sometimes run into tasks that require access to email mailboxes. In most cases, this is done using the Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP. As a PHP developer, I first turned to PHP's built in IMAP library, but this library is buggy and impossible to debug or modify. So today we will create a working IMAP email client from the ground up using PHP. We will also see how to use Gmail's special commands.

Performance and data interoperability are critical to the success of any web application. For web apps that need to support video processing -- which is inherently compute- and I/O-intensive -- these challenges are particularly acute. In this post, I describe some of my experience successfully incorporating video capabilities into a PHP-based web app, leveraging open source technologies and cloud-based services to the greatest extent possible.

Every once in a while PHP developers are charged with tasks that require them to extend the functionalities of legacy projects, a task that often includes building REST APIs. Building a REST API for PHP-based projects is challenging, but in the absence of proper frameworks and tools, it can also be a particularly difficult goal to get right. In this article, Toptal engineer Arminas Zukauskas shares his advice, with sample code, on how to build a modern structured REST API around existing legacy PHP projects.

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.

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.

>If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's a well known phrase, but as we know, most of the human technological progress was made by people who decided to fix what isn’t broken. Especially in the software industry one could argue that most of what we do is fixing what isn’t broken. Fixing functionality, improving the UI, improving speed and memory efficiency, adding features: these are all activities for which it is easy to see if they are worth doing, and then we argue for or against spending our time on them. However, there is an activity, which for the most part falls into a gray area: refactoring, and especially large scale refactoring.