One of my projects in the past few weeks has been to put together a SOAP server for a client. So suddenly I've had to learn a lot of the nitty gritty details about what works and what doesn't...
While they're fresh, let me jot them down here. WARNING: Extremely technical content ahead.
What's extraordinary about the open source community is that this level of support happens all the time, every day, without charge, in hundreds, thousands of projects out there.
At Freelock, we're always trying to figure out ways to do things better.
I've been struggling to get Project Auriga to set HTTP Auth from a nice pretty login form, and think I have it working.
What follows is a very technical discussion--if you're a business reader, you should probably skip this post...
PHP development is one of our specialties at Freelock Computing. I've written quite a few PHP applications, some from scratch, some starting with other people's code, some as extensions for open source projects.
There are thousands of languages out there, but only a couple handfuls are used for web applications. Of these, PHP is a runaway success. Yet I constantly see it criticized by developers of other languages, often for completely untrue reasons.
Before code can be customizable, it must be clear. But clarity is not enough, if you're going to be using a codebase in multiple places.
Programming is an exercise in understanding a problem. To program effectively, you need to fully understand, in intricate detail, the problem your program is solving. Sometimes as a programmer you don't fully understand the problem until you've wrestled with it a few times in code.
Programming borrows a lot from the construction industry. Many programming terms derive from construction: hacking, builds, development, architecture, scaffolding, frameworks, and dozens of others. But in some ways, programming has an element of power beyond construction.
Continuing on the series, the next item on the list seems to be the mistake I see the most--putting slow code in loops, loading up things that don't need to be loaded, making simple requests expensive.
There are many articles that cover PHP vulnerabilities, but I've run across a lot of programmers and code that seems oblivious to them.
We're hiring programmers, over at Freelock. I've been going through lots code samples to try to identify how experienced and competent a particular developer is. I also do this on a regular basis to evaluate how solid a particular open source project is.
