SSL is the most modern and secure method of sending user authentication data over the public Internet. But if SSL is not available, you should turn to HTTP’s Digest Access Authentication over it’s Basic Authentication. Digest Access improves on Basic by sending password information as an MD5-hash so it’s harder to reverse engineer than the plain text/Base64 encoding. This article discussed Digest Access, including the security features that update the method’s original RFC.

Openbiz Cubi is a robust PHP application framework giving developers the ability to create business applications with minimal effort. In this two-part series you’ll learn the concepts and steps necessary to create your own business web applications with Cubi. This part looks at the challenges web developers face and how Cubi can help.

Deprecating features before they are done away or transformed gives users who depend on your code time to update their own code. By following the advice in this article, you will find it easier to keep your code fresh and your users won’t have any unhappy surprises.

A proper understanding of indexing is important since it can improve the performance and throughput of your application. This series on MongoDB indexing concludes with a look at a few small but important concepts, like indexing on sub-documents and embedded fields, covered queries, and index direction.

Maven for PHP is a capable build automation tool for the PHP platform. Using Maven, the user only needs to provide the configuration for the project, while the configurable plugins do the work of compiling the project, running unit tests, generating API documentation and so on. Through this article you will gain familiarity with Maven for PHP, and how to install and use the PHP-Maven plugin from the command line and in Eclipse.

A lot of developers are fanboys of their PHP framework of choice. Just like in politics, everyone chooses a side. And most of the time you can stay with your choice, but it’s always good to explore new things. For one developer it meant goodbye CodeIgniter, hello Laravel.

A proper understanding of indexing is critical because it can dramatically increase performance and throughput by reducing the number of full documents to be read, thereby increasing the performance of your application. This two-part series takes a look at indexing with MongoDB, starting here exploring the default _id index, secondary, compound, multikey, and multikey compound indexes.

If your site allows users to upload photos, then image cropping/resizing functionality can certainly come in handy. Users might not have access to image programs like Photoshop, so by providing a cropping/resizing feature you can let them upload photos without them having to worry about the final size. See how you can create an image cropping tool with the help of the ImageMagick PHP extension.

The Ctype extension functions verify whether all of the characters in a given string are of the correct type. This article take a look at the syntax used by the functions, what specific checks exist, and how they’re used to perform validation on strings.

Random values play an important role in many PHP applications, and many libraries and frameworks rely on them for generating tokens, salts, and as input for functions. This article gives you an overview of what random values are used for and why they’re important, and peeks under the hood of how they’re generated.