The NetTuts.com site has a new tutorial posted covering form validation in CodeIgniter "from start to finish" showing you how to use the built-in functionality to verify the information coming from your users.

As a web application developer, form validation is a crucial part of your work, and it should not be underrated as it could lead to security flaws in your application. You should consider it a must if you're striving to provide a professional end user experience.

In this article, we'll go through the built-in form validation library in the CodeIgniter framework. Here are the highlights of today's article: [The use of ] basic form validation, cascading and prepping, custom error messages, custom validation callback, and validation configuration

They start off by covering some of the basic included rules using a simple controller and view. These checks include values being required, maximum length of text, alphanumeric only, valid email and checking that the value is a valid IPv4 address. The example also shows how to make use of the "cascading" rules and using the rules system to "prep" the data first. They walk through each line of the code that defines the rules talking about what it does and how they can be adjusted to fit your needs. They cover more in-depth how cascading and prepping work, how to customize error messages and create custom callback validation rules you can apply along with the standard ones.

On his blog today Shameer Chamal has a new post about a framework he's recently developed an appreciation for (he calls it "awesome" in fact) - Kohana.

In this article we will discuss some important features of Kohana, a promising and the sexiest community driven php framework. This article is pretty basic and intended to instigate those who are still not familiar with this framework. One of the problem with this framework is the lack of well organized documentation. Anyway there are many useful resources available and I have mentioned some of them at the end of this article.

He talks about some of the things he likes best about the framework including its HMVC (hierarchical Model view controller) support allowing you to cascade files down, allowing overrides at any level (good illustration here). He also talks about the scalability it offers and how, because of the HMVC functionality, you can split things up into interchangeable parts that can be pulled in based on the situation. Other features briefly mentioned include easy configuration, security and the exception handling and profiling.

In a recent post to his blog Eric Reis talks about "why PHP won" in his web application development over other (web scripting) languages:

Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - let's face it - PHP can be pretty painful. As a language, it's inelegant. Its object-orientation support is "much improved" - which is another way of saying it's been horrendous for a long time. Writing unit tests or mock objects in PHP is an exercise in constant frustration. And yet I keep returning to PHP as a development platform, as have most of my fellow startup CTOs. This post is about why.

He includes four things (that would be needed to counter the information cascade that PHP has) a "new challenger" language might need to burst PHP's bubble.

• Speed of iteration (a good write/test/debug cycle)
• Better mapping of outputs to inputs
• A similar standard library
• A better OOP implementation

He gets a bit confusing in there, moving back and forth between "PHP is good" and "PHP is bad" comments but he does come back to the one thing that everyone can agree on - regardless of your personal bias, you should always consider this: "it's all about picking the right tool for the job".

Sebastian Bergmann talks about a new bit of functionality he's put into the 3.4 release of PHPUnit (the popular unit testing tool for PHP) based on a suggestion from a paper he'd read:

Back in July, I came across an academic paper (more academic papers on testing that I read recently) titled "JExample: Exploiting Dependencies Between Tests to Improve Defect Localization". [...] For the upcoming PHPUnit 3.4 I have implemented support for the idea expressed in the paper mentioned above.

The feature is a system that helps localize problems at the source, stripping away all of the cascading issues it might have tripped off, causing other tests to fail. This new feature (as illustrated by his code example using a DependencyFailureTest class) makes it simple to fail a test immediately whenever the scripts needs to via a fail() method. Check out the full post for the rest of the code and some further explanation on how it works.