Linux and PHP web application support and development (Bromsgrove, UK)
A customer recently asked us to perform some enhancements to some code they’d purchased – when we started looking at it, some obvious glaring security holes stood out – //This stops SQL Injection in GET vars foreach ($_GET as $key => $value) { $_GET[$key] = mysql_real_escape_string($value); } And – if (isset($_GET[“job_id”])) { $job_id = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET[“job_id”]); […]
We’ve been fairly busy this week, so I thought I’d try and summarise what’s been happening in Pale Purple towers this week. So, we’ve: Submitted one mobile app to Apple (PhoneGap) Created a proof of concept marketing mobile app (PhoneGap) for iPad/tablets Finished one native commercial Android app (Java/web services) Alex (new IY placement) has […]
At the moment we’re redeveloping an existing JSON based API, which is used by a mobile application. We knew the performance of the previous release of the API was good – it’s been in use for the last two years without any problems, and easily outperforms a competitor’s API. However, our dataset size is due […]
How to improve WordPress/Apache performance on a relatively heavily loaded server using Varnish and more
Last Tuesday I [DG] presented a talk to BCS Birmingham, titled “Everything is turning mobile” (See the Birmingham.BCS.org website here). I’ve also been “volunteered” into presenting a similar talk to the Wolverhampton branch of BCS sometime in the next month or two. The talk covered a little bit of history (i.e.. what was happening 5-10 years […]
It appears to be that time of the year when I arrange to take a trip to Aberystwyth to interview students for a possible Industrial Year placement with Pale Purple. We’ve had 13 applications this year – some names I remember from the Gregynog interviews back in Autumn 2011. They all look good – so […]
On Friday and Saturday, last week, the annual London PHP conference took place. We were there on Friday – and I saw the talks on : “The Journey towards Continuous Integration” (which has prompted me to upgrade our internal Jenkins based CI infrastructure and introduce Sonar for long term statistics capture) “Security Audits as an Integral part […]
One often overlooked, area ripe for improvement on websites is that of page weight – namely how much data needs to be downloaded by the web browser before the page is rendered. Most web pages will be constructed from a mixture of Javascript, Stylesheets (CSS), Images and HTML. A BBC news article states that the […]
This post is based upon some content within our PHP OO training course (which covers design patterns). The circuit breaker design pattern is a fairly simple, and handy approach to dealing with remote services which may be offline. To explain the pattern, here’s a semi-true story – So, imagine the front page of a website […]
We seem to have too much work at the moment; and will need to either hire a new developer within the next few months – or use a freelancer/contractor. So if you’re looking for work (or a change) here are some details: Your primary role will involve building and testing PHP based web applications. PHP […]