As long as you make sure you always use strict checking (=== and !==) where you can, and fall back to the loose checks when you must. As a PHP developer, I think it's very important to understand and memorize exactly how these work, whether you're writing new code, or maintaining existing code.

He points out a specific example of some code that seems counter-intuitive when you compare how it reads and how it actually works (strings converted to floats and evaluated)

The moral is: always do strict checks when you are able to.

If you have ever used iterators in your code, you have probably implemented the Iterator interface. Objects of a class that implements Iterator can be iterated over with the foreach loop. [...] The IteratorAggregate interface is quite similar [to Iterator] (both interfaces implement Traversable) but creates an external Iterator. But when the iterator is based on an array, creating an external Iterator for this array gives you a more concise and more readable code.

His example code shows how, in implementing and IteratorAggregate, you can grab the instance of the Iterator even if it's based on an array.

If you exclude C and its child C++, the most popular programming languages in the world are Java and PHP, which power most of the dynamic web. I have working experience with PHP and for academical purposes I am deepening my knowledge of Java, thus I'd like to point out similarities and key differences between these two languages. Every language has its pros and cons, so there's no absolute winner here.

He briefly covers their history, java's static versus PHP's dynamic typing, how they both handle objects, their execution plans and how easy they are to deploy when it comes to general applications.

Consider i do not have wide experience programming with ASP.NET though i on the past used the Microsoft .NET framework. This is what i think are PRO and the CONS of both, lets consider ASP.NET 4.0 without MVC and PHP 5.3 without any framework.

Some of the pros of PHP include its low learning curve and that it's multiplatform with cons being things like performance issues and that it's more web-centric than some other languages. ASP.NET's pros include its inherent use of the .NET framework and the tools available for it with cons being that it's not Open Source, you need a Windows license to use it and that fewer web hosting providers support it.

In this post I want to begin looking at some of the differences between the two drivers and perhaps gain an understanding of why the mssql driver continues to be used (although I have some good guesses). There are lots of comparison points between the mssql and sqlsrv drivers. I'll break my comparison into two posts, focusing on high-level differences in this post and then dive into an API comparison in the next post.

This first of the two parts looks at some of the differences between the two - the Microsoft support for the sqlsrv driver vs community-driven mssql and the fact that they're very different "under the hood" (see this diagram).

One of my projects, QueryPath, performs many tasks that require maintaining a set of unique objects. In my quest to optimize QueryPath, I have been looking into various ways of efficiently storing sets of objects in a way that provides expedient containment checks. [...] Recently I narrowed the list of candidates down to two methods: Use good old fashioned arrays to emulate a hash set or use the SPLObjectStorage system present in PHP 5.2 and up.

He works through the comparison, showing how each of them can emulate the hashed set with the goal of being able to easily iterate and simple to search. The result is that PHP's normal arrays best the SplObjectStorage object in his benchmarking (code included).

So, cross site request forgeries are a pretty common topic these days; they're in almost every security talk, book, site etc. This is okay; they're important [...] Most of the sites, and all of the books I've read demonstrate things correctly, but when it comes to actual implementation, time and time again, I see code that's just wrong.

He looks at two of the "essentials" when it comes to protecting you and your application - comparison (not taking other values of variables into account) and the unpredictable token (not making tokens, like md5 hashes of information, random enough).

The fact that type save comparisons (ala ===) are faster in PHP than the normal comparison operator (ala ==). The reason for this is simply, that PHPs loosly-typed-ness-auto-cast-code is not even touched with ===

He also points out an interesting condition that saves a bit of computing time - comparing the isset() of a variable to true over the count() to zero. Some of his benchmarking (code) shows this in action.

Because it uses whitelists and a comprehensive knowledge of the HTML specification, it is bullet-proof against XSS, fixes malformed input rather than reject it, and is open and extensible. The 2.0.0 release lets users customize HTML Purifier's tag sets easier than ever before.

You can check out the official release announcement for of the updates in this release (including a comparison to other similar libraries). There's also a demo they've posted so you can give it a try.

They look first at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other langauges, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion.