Popular Posts

 PHP 5.3

The PHP 5.3 stable release is imminent.

“PHP 5.3.0 is a newly developed version of PHP featuring long-awaited features like namespaces, late static binding, closures and much more.”

It is scheduled on June 30th

(via) Lukas Smith

 Site Update

Thank you everyone who read, contributed, and subscribed on Server-Side Magazine.
As you discovered, SSM is struggling a little bit, but I still have plans with it.

I’m considering to re-brand the website, creating a new theme and writing more interesting articles.

So stay tuned!

 SQL Query Tester v0.1

SSM presents another great tool called SQL Query Tester.

It is created for web developers who are working / testing SQL queries a lot. The nice thing about this tool is that it gets the query results via AJAX, so you don’t have to refresh the page, it has a SQL syntax highlighter and a basic profiling tool.

It is written in PHP and jQuery, using ADOdb as a database abstraction layer and CodePress for the SQL editor.

It’s completely open source, you can find it at: code.google.com/p/sql-query-tester

If you want to contribute or suggest features don’t hesitate to comment here or on the project’s groups page.

Screenshot:

SQL Query Tester Screenshot

 Subscribers

I’m proud to announce that Server-Side Magazine just reached 104 RSS and 5 e-mail subscribers.

Thank you for everyone who is interested in the website, I hope you’ll enjoy reading Server-Side Magazine in the future too.

If you have any questions or suggestions on how we should improve the website don’t hesitate to leave a comment or to write an e-mail.

 How to Inherit from Multiple Objects (Workaround)

As you may know, inheriting from multiple objects in PHP 5 is impossible, because of the language restrictions. You can’t write code such as this:

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class Child extends Mother, Father {
	//class code here
}

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 Session Hijacking

The usage of sessions is the php developer’s most common use since we constantly need to transact data from step to step. An average programmer would say that using sessions is far more secure than letís say cookies since the session data is server side data, thing that is partially correct.

The fact that the attacker can’t have a clear look at what and where you store comes to your advantage but a more dedicated attacker can go a bit further than this presumption.

A must have for the attacker in a session hijack is the Session Identifier so he can impersonate the attack. Let’s presume for example that you have your website hosted on a shared hosting on which PHP is installed as an Apache module, thing that makes session files belong to the web user, in other words: accessible.

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 Fresh Links November 26th, 2008

ASP.Net

Ruby

PHP

 PHP Security Measures Against CSRF Attacks

CSRF stand for Cross Site Request Forgeries, it’s a method that allows an outside attacker to send malformed HTTP requests to a website, but from a victim’s computer. In this case the actual victim is the accomplice to this attack.

Stronger security measures must be implemented in order to avoid CSRF attacks, and to make sure the website and it’s users are not vulnerable.

To better understand CSRF attacks let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re signed in to Facebook, you browse around and in the mean time you open a new window or a new tab and visit another site. It’s a typical scenario. Now, your still signed in at Facebook on the other tab and you visit a site where there’s a CSRF attack implemented. Now the CSRF site actually could send out spam to your Facebook friends or even delete your account, all this using your credentials, because a session is saved when you logged into Facebook (remember, on the other tab).

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 Fresh Links November 10th, 2008

Here at Server-Side Magazine we like to keep an eye on other server-side programming related sites and tutorials. We collected a few links for you to read and enjoy.

PHP

Ruby

ASP.Net

 Beginning PHP

This tutorial will cover the basic syntax and common features of PHP. It assumes that you already know what is a server-side scripting language and you have already installed and set up PHP on your development machine.

If you want to learn PHP, you should start by reading this article, which covers the absolute basics of PHP programming language.

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