Some Interesting Facts about PHP Development

PHP is among the most rewarding coding languages one will ever work with. Give that the inconsistencies in the function names can get a little frustrating, yet making effective use of PHP development is a very enjoyable experience for any developer. Before you start using this tool on a frequent basis, let’s make sure that you have some of these interesting facts in place:-

An Introduction

Originally standing for Personal Home Page, it is now officially known as ‘Hypertext Preprocessor’. Released in the year 1995, it was initially written as a set of Common Gateway Interface in C. Today, some of the largest internet brands such as Facebook, Yahoo, Friendster, Flickr and Digg; make use of PHP development tools for the website.

How to Use this Tool Effectively:-

1. Save storage space by a factor of four by using ip2long() and long2ip to store your IP addresses as integers as against strings in a database. This way, it is also a lot simpler to calculate if an address falls within a range and quickens the searches and sorting.

2. If you are able to maintain a database intensive website, you can quicken your queries by incorporating prepared statements. Consider using the enhanced functions of mysqli_* as against the mysql_*; especially if you are using PHP 5 with MySQL 4.1 or above.

3. Instead of starting your PHP development initiative from scratch, don’t waste your time trying to reinvent some of the codes, you can look up some great resources online which make available for developers thousands of reusable codes that will easily fit into your application. This can be extremely time saving especially for the parts which require standard coding.

4. You can use highlight_file() to automatically print a well formatted copy of the source code for your pages. This tool is extremely useful when you need help with a script in an IRC or message board. Make sure you take utmost care before printing, to hide confidential information such as passwords and DB connection information before you share your source codes.

5. Using codes such as checkdnsrr() you can facilitate the partial validation of emails by cross verifying if the domain names really exist. This function ensures if a specific domain name resolves to any IP address and can come extremely handy through the working of your pages.

6. It is important that as a developer you do everything you can to avoid the cropping up of sensitive error messages to users who are using the functions of error_reporting(0). Integrating accurate coding systems will help prevent any confidential or sensitive SQL queries and path names being displayed to unauthorized users.

Before you start using PHP development tools understand its uniqueness and how to optimize its features with utmost efficiency.

The versatility of this coding system means that can be used on almost every operating system such a Linux, Window and iOS. Originally designed to develop dynamic and interactive pages, this widely used open source scripting language is a blessing for developers around the world.