Please make sure you upgrade your PHP version to the latest version as soon as possible as it has a major security flaw which makes websites subject to the following DOS attack.

All you have to do is make PHP interpreter (older than 5.3.5 or 5.2.17) to convert string "2.2250738585072011e-308" to be casted into a numeric type. So if you have a form that accepts numbers which are then cast from strings into numeric values on server side you are probably affected.

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I have played around with CouchDB half year ago and it's performance was just horrible. I have heard a lot of good about mongodb recently so i thought i will have a look at it.

I think that NoSQL can have really good use cases in web. The problem is that you need a really performant and stable system if you want to use it in production. I ran just a few simple tests so its not a real benchmark or anything. It is just a simple test trying to figure out how far behind are nosql solutions (performancewise).

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In my previous companies we used to serve sessions from mysql via a custom made session handlers and to be honest we never really had any problems with it. I cant actually remember the traffics and concurrency rates but it was not that low. Currently the solution im working with uses memcached for sessions storage, the default build in session handler. I am a bit worried about the way it works with memcached.

Problems with memcached sessions in PHP

First of all memcached is a cache storge engine and it was not designed with sessions in mind. The way php extension uses memcache causes a few more problems in the long run. Here are my concerns:

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Jmeter is a very useful tool for not only performance tests but also for automation of all sorts of web tests. Its not as powerful as selenium when it comes to ajax etc but it still allows to login, keep session and execute any sequence of http calls.

In addition to ab (apache benchmark) and curl it comes in handy when you want to stress test your applications to see the capacity and possible bottlenecks.

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Internet Explorer is often causing issues as there is no effective way of debugging the websites css and javascript. Firebug is one of the best tools i have ever seen as php developer. Now using a simple link you can run it in IE as well!

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The most amazing thing Microsoft has done in years was releasing virtual pc and testing system images for free! Now you can install many operating system on your virtual pc and test the website in all possible browsers!

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I am very happy to write that it is a great book. It is not really a PHP book as you might expect as there is little PHP code in it. It is a software engineering book in context of PHP development. It is a book that every PHP developer should read and i am convinced that everyone will find there something interesting.

Book does not describe syntax of foreach loop nor does it iterate over obvious coding examples. It provides a full overview of enterprise development. It shows who are the peoples working in enterprise PHP companies, what roles they have, what processes they apply and what tools they use.

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So for start i would setup Acquia from acquia.com and see their set of modules and their setup. Its a project based on Drupal (led by Drupal initial creator). It uses many of the modules and tries to make the system a bit more user friendly and feature rich.

Then after you get familiar with some of the concepts get the newest drupal release and install modules listed below.

• Administration Menu - nice fast menu at the top of the page
• Google Analytics - flexible way to track activity of your visitors
• Pathauto - generates SEO friendly urls for your pages
• Printer-friendly pages - makes printer friendly versions of your pages as well as easy pdf generation
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• CMS systems
• CMS
• Drupal
• Drupal Modules
• Open Source
• PHP

I really love Postgres and i was always happy with its flexibility, performance and features. So starting work on a new Drupal setup i thought ok, lets take advantage of that great 'database abstraction layer'. I really tried, i fixed bugs in some modules and had high hopes. I hope it will get better in the future but for now i would not recommend it. See more details in the full post.

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A few hints how to get started with Drupal and not get stressed out too much.

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I was looking for a good cms system for a long time. And i really could not find one. I was playing with ez publish and joomla and basically i was depressed. I have never seen more confusing and user-unfriendly systems in my life! Especially joomla is a huge surprise. How in the world did it become so popular?

Any way if you are considering a new cms you might find some tips here.

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W większości przypadków na serverach polecałbym dystrybucję stable a na desktopach wersję testing. Wtedy instalujemy wszystko z pakietów binarnych. Jednak nieraz nie sa one wystarczająco aktualne wtedy mozemy sięgnąć po instalację ze źródeł.

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Ten post jest częścia materiałów do wykładu z podstaw technologii www tak że jest on bardzo pobierzny. Może jednak się przydać w zrozumieniu niektórych zaganień i poznaniu składni html i php.

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Bezpieczeństwo aplikacji www to temat morze. Trzeba czytać na bierząco tydzień w tydzień. Nie ma innej rady. Za kazdym razem gdy myślisz że już się na tym trochę znasz to ludzie wynajdą kompletnie nowy sposób hakowania i bida. Tak że utrzymanie aplikacji webowych bezpiecznymi to ciągłe śledzenie zagrorzeń, modyfikowanie skryptów i konfiguracji i planowanie na przyszłość.

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Kompilowanie pakietów w systemach jak debian na maszynach amd64 nie ma specjalnie sensu ponieważ pakiety dostarczane wraz z systemem będą zoptymalizowane na nasza platformę tak czy siak. Nie pomoże nam to wtedy w żaden specjalny sposób. Jeśli jednak używamy domyślnych pakietów dostarczanych z dystrybucją na i386 możemy zaoszczędzić pamieci oraz cykli procesora kompilując wszytko samemu. Ponadto możemy dodać lub pozbyć się niektórych modułów.

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