Vol. 4, Issue 9 Vol. 4, Issue 9 FREE! 10.99 CAD 9.19 USD The September 2005 Issue Is On Us! This issue is completely free to all our registered users. To download it, you will need to create an account on the php|a website—it's completely free and there is absolutely no obligation. The Account creation process is part of our checkout. Just add this issue to your basket and proceed to checkout. As long as your basket total is $0, you will not be asked for any payment information. The information you provide us will be used in accordance with our privacy policy (essentially, unless you authorize us otherwise, we will only use it to notify when a new issue of php|a becomes available). An Introduction to PDO A common complaint of the anti-PHP “expert” is the lack of a bundled, uniform database access component. With the advent of an improved object model, in PHP 5.0, a few of PHP’s core developers decided that the time has come to fill this hole with PHP Data Objects (PDO). The package, itself, has been in PECL for quite a while, now, but with the upcoming release PHP 5.1, PDO will be bundled in the main PHP distribution. What does it do? How does it work? One of PDO’s main developers, Ilia Alshanetsky, explains. Click here for this month's sample article. Roll Your Own Data Abstraction Module You may already use database abstraction in your applications, perhaps through one of the available data-base abstraction layers, such as PEAR::DB, or PDO (see the PDO article in this issue), but what about various idiosyncrasies in the actual SQL? Perhaps you’ve never even considered this problem. This article will help you the data abstraction beast. Implementing Your Own Trackbacks If you’ve been around the internet for any length of time, chances are you’ve seen a weblog. Chances are, if you’ve seen a weblog, then you’ve seen a trackback. You might not have known it at the time or even understood what it was, but more and more of the blogging tools out there are using them. So, what are these elusive trackbacks and why do they even exist? Author Chris Cornutt explains. End-To-End Testing With PHP and Internet Explorer Automated testing can greatly improve the quality of your product. In this article, Oz presents a framework for creating automated tests that can simulate end-user activity. By leveraging the full faculty of Internet Ex-plorer, these tests can do just about anything that your users can do. Security Corner: PHP Security Audits Peer reviews are one of the most useful and underutilized development techniques. Although professional security audits tend to be quite expensive, peer reviews can offer a great deal of value at a decreased cost. With a moderate understanding of how to audit PHP code, you can be a valuable asset to any PHP development team, and columnist Chris Shiflett shows you how. Test Pattern: State of Confusion Bug-free code is code you can understand completely. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much to cause us uncertainty. Even a small amount of complexity will place demands on our memory, and our memory is extremely limited. If we tax our brains, we will get bugs. Marcus Baker examines how the number of bugs in a piece of code can be correlated to its readability. Tips & Tricks: Input Filtering, Part 3 This month’s installment of Tips & Tricks concludes the series on filtering input, providing practical examples and helpful tips to filter input using regular expressions, test for the length of data, and ensure acceptable values.