Author Archive

Let’s talk about your password model

This entire article is obviated by the password_hash family of functions. Please check out password_hash() and friends for information on the up-to-date and correct way to handle passwords. Generally speaking, if you are using another method, it is wrong. More specifically, if you are using another method, and it is not based on crypt(), or […]

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Pour Some Syntactic Sugar On Me: ‘Unless’ Keyword

Let’s face it, syntactic sugar can be a very attractive feature for a language (I consider Perl to be an extremely powerful language composed almost entirely of syntactic sugar), and I think it’s about time we all started demanding the “Unless” Keyword as a counterpart to the “If” Keyword. Let me give you a pretty […]

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Arrays of Objects and __get: Friends Forever

In PHP, an object is always passed around as a reference, which allows one to deal with objects in a very transparent manner, since the only way to deal with a by-value copy instead of the real deal is to explicitly use the clone operator. Recently, I came upon a situation in which it was […]

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Did You Know? Class Visibility in PHP

While it remains an imperative-style language, since version 5 PHP’s object model has gotten significantly more sophisticated. While in PHP 4 objects were little more than arrays with functions, the newer versions have most of the trimmings of modern OOP. Among those, probably considered a basic triviality at best, is member visibility. In fact, since […]

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009