This seems like a no-brain-er but I have seen it more times than I can count and I have seen it happen to some very experienced developers. Put simply: authentication is not enough; you need to make sure that the authenticated user is actually authorized to perform an action. It is one thing to know who a user is and an entirely different — though equally important — thing to know what a user is allowed to do.
This article covers the concepts of authentication and authorization.
CakeFest is an annual gathering of CakePHP developers. This year’s conference is being held in Chicago, IL from September 2nd to the 5th.
I will be presenting a talk on API Development. As the conference gets closer I will update this page with outlines, links, downloads, and eventually the final presentation.
One of the things that separates a good web application from a great one is how gracefully they handle failures. One of the often overlooked cases is when a user attempts to upload a file that exceeds the set PHP upload file size. This article shows how to detect when the user tries to upload a file that is too large and display an appropriate message.
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Expert PHP and MySQL is a perfect book for advanced PHP and MySQL programmers who want to take their code to the next level.
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MyVBO is a business application created by people who know business. It brings all your business needs into one place, including purchasing, stock quotes, Quickbooks, and Twitter.
You are in for a headache if you have try to call a method or create a member variable with the name of a reserved word in Actionscript. It can lead to such fun situations as having variables called: insert; update; deleteSomething. Because calling the third variable “delete” may be logical but it is a reserved word so that is out of the question. It gets hairier when you don’t necessarily have control over the object format (such is often the case with remote calls). I ran into this today when trying to call the “node_delete” (or “node.delete”) method in Drupal via Services and AMFPHP. This is frustrating so I’m going to show two situations where you could run into this problem and how I fixed them.
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Rest assured. Soon I will be writing “Things about PHP 5.3 that make me cringe” but for now I sing the praises of the latest release of PHP that that came out today. I’ve been playing with the new release for months and there are indeed many good things about it and many of them have been a long time coming.
The other day I was reading the release notes and I couldn’t help but smile.
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Every display markup language has its frustrating moments. Adobe Flex isn’t any exception. I ran into a little trouble a while back when trying to put a drop shadow on a HBox component. Here is the effect that I wanted to achieve:
Flex form with drop shadow header