On December 21, 2011 Stefan Koopmanschap wrote an excellent article on this blog titled "Painless (well, less painful) migration to Symfony2." [...] We were very much inspired by his passionate elucidation and we were fully convinced of the urge to start migrating to Symfony2 as soon as possible. However, he also provided us with a "A word of caution" about 2 things: performance and authentication/authorization. This might get some people worried, but not us: it challenged us to find a solution for those two open issues.

They explain why these two things are a problem and some of their solutions they've created - a .htaccess for routing and manually replicating the Symfony2 session in the Symfony1 code. Included in the post are the rewrite rules and code to make these two things happen (and a small configuration change to make them work).

Computers cannot generate random numbers. A machine which works in ones and zeros is unable to magically invent its own stream of random data. However, computers can implement mathematical algorithms which produce pseudo-random numbers. They look like random numbers. They feel like random distributions. But they're fake; the same sequence of digits is generated if you run the algorithm twice.

Included in the post is code showing how to use the random functions and how to create a class (Random) that provides a few methods to help make generation easier - "seed" and "num". It first calls "seed" with a number to start the random generator off with and then "num" in a loop to pull out random values based on that.

We started the study of PHP magic methods by learning about __get() magic method. [...] PHP is loosely typed language and same variable can be used or referred as string, number or object. The __toString() method is called when the code attempts to treat an object like a string. This function does not accept any arguments and should return a string.

Some quick code is included showing how it works - returning a combined string made from two private class properties when the object ($obj) is echoed out. They also show multiple ways of using the method in both pre- and post-PHP 5.2.

In this article I will discuss traits, a new feature introduced in PHP 5.4 to overcome [issues where multiple inheritance is needed]. The concept of traits itself is nothing new to programming and is used in other languages like Scala and Perl. They allows us to horizontally reuse code across independent classes in different class hierarchies.

Included in the post is example code showing what the use of a trait looks like and a method for creating a Singleton that can spawn instances of two classes. Also included are examples of:

• using multiple traits at once,
• traits made up of traits,
• the importance of order,
• aliasing to avoid conflicts,
• reflection
• and a few other features that come along with their use.

With Twitter moving its API to OAuth the idea of using tokens rather than passwords for authentication went mainstream. Many explanations of OAuth make it seem complicated whereas in reality the "OAuth Dance" is a series of simple steps executed in sequence. This talk covers consuming and providing OAuth services, includes implementation examples, and is recommended for all technical leads, architects, and integration specialists.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can follow along with the presentation in her slides.