Genius Open Source Libraries

Some time ago, Genius Engineering decided to unify the manner in which we encode values that contain user input. We previously depended upon the PHP built-in htmlentities() and some simple wrappers around it for our encoding needs, but this function alone can’t safely sanitize tainted data in all contexts. Furthermore, we didn’t have a unified vision of whether encoding should happen immediately upon receipt of data from the user or when we display that data to the user.

Never having to use $_GET or $_POST again

I completely missed this great new feature build in PHP 5.2 since I haven’t been using much vanilla PHP lately due to my preference for CodeIgniter.

Open Source Your Career, my story

About a month ago my good friend Lorna Mitchell put out a call for stories on how working with Open Source has influenced people's careers. Given that a lot of my recent career has been driven by my involvement in Open Source, I shared my story with Lorna. But I also wanted to share some of my story with everyone. So here is my story and opinion on how Open Source can influence your career in a positive way.

Drupal 7 and Drupal Gardens are on the Way

The new hosted Drupal service called Drupal Gardens, was recently given beta status. This announcement means that anyone can now go to the site and start using the beta for free. The leaders of the Drupal community have also announced that the next version of Drupal should have its beta release sometime in August. However, they're going to need plenty of help from the community to fix the remaining bugs by August.

JSON in Javascript

JSON is being widely used in Web for data transfer from client to server. But here in this article we will be understanding on what is JSON and how to use JSON in Javascript. The way JSON object is created is independent of any programming language you use. Also if you follow the JSON protocol, javascript will recognize your JSON object.

Practical PHP Patterns: Two Step View

The Two Step View pattern, as its own name suggests, proposes a mechanism composed of two steps for generating an HTML page: first, a logical representation of the page is produced, as a map (key => value) of the different elements of the page. Then, the physical representation is rendered, by juggling around the single elements to compose the final HTML. The first step is usually related to particular page-related presentation code, while the second step introduces some global or category-related presentation, like a common layout.

Missing the point (OOP in scripting languages)

Yesterday I came across a question: Do Web-Scripting Languages Really Need OOP? Here's my answer: only if you want to do more than an Hello World script (which is paradoxically how old school programmers measure the utility of a language.) I'll express some of my thoughts without compromises, which will be up to you.

MongoDB ODM: Document-Oriented Databases vs. Relational Databases.

My last post brought up a lot of questions on the differences between document-oriented and relational databases, possible use cases for each and approaches and gotchas one should remember when dealing with either. I had some thoughts on the subject, but they didn't feel complete, so I decided to do some research. I started out by googling "document -oriented databases vs relational databases", which brought a number of interesting results. After some intense reading and analyzing, I think I have a good enough understanding of the concepts, strengths and weaknesses of different data stores to write and share my findings.