In early 2012, the official release of PHP5.4 is expected (it’s currently in its fourth release candidate stage). PHP5.4 completes many of the additions that were planned for PHP6 (several others, such as namespaces, were added in PHP5.3). Along with the additions, many of the features that have been deprecated in PHP and were set to be removed in version 6.0 are now being removed in 5.4 instead, such as PHP’s Safe Mode.

The main reason I wanted to use PHP6 when I wrote the third edition of my “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide” book is the intended support for Unicode. I had not seen this before, but I guess the attempted move to Unicode resulted in PHP scripts requiring twice as much memory as before, with a noticeable lag in performance. This is why the developers had to scrap those plans. But PHP 5.4 has “inline support” for several new languages, including Japanese and some dialects of Chinese. In other words, PHP5.4 has kind of a Unicode-light support. This Unicode support won’t be activated unless specified during the installation process.

…

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Are You Thinking? => Bimonthly Newsletters
• On the Web => How To Read a PHP Function Definition
• On the Blog => Finding Book Bonus Content
• Q&A => Do You Use Any Tools to Debug Your PHP Scripts?
• What is Larry Thinking => Testing Your PHP Knowledge
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design”

\[intlink id="1564" type="page"\]\[/intlink\]

has gone out every 3-4 weeks, and is around 3,000 words long (that’s my target). I’m debating switching the newsletter’s schedule to every two weeks. If I were to do this, I’d likely cut the length by about half. I’d also change a couple of other things about the regular content: probably drop the “About This Newsletter” section and alternate what other sections are used, for starters. What do you think?

Please use the poll below to vote. If you have any specific comments, please post them using the comments form. Thanks for your input and for your interest in what I do!

\[poll id="2"\]

I’ve never been much of a New Year’s Resolution person: if something is important enough to do, start today, not on some arbitrary date that happens to be the first day of the year. (Or, you know, January 2nd, because the first is a holiday and all.) But this year I happen to have quite a long non-resolutions list. The timing is entirely coincidental: I just happen to be almost done with my Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design book, and I always have a long list of things to do between books. I only have two more chapters to write on this book, and the end is in site!

In a recent newsletter, I answered a question about how I spend my time between projects. For me, the biggest projects I have, in terms of stress and time consumption, are the books I write. The client projects–Web development and such, no matter how big or complicated, never seem to be that much of a burden. Mostly this is because I find programming to be much easier than writing about programming, and because it’s fun to make things happen, to implement new concepts. Over the course of a year, I’ll work on any number of projects, ranging from consulting a couple of hours here or there (i.e., helping to steer the actual developers) to doing all of the development myself. When these bigger projects are done, I’m pleased to have them off of my list, but there’s never the huge sigh of relief that I have when I’ve finished a book. And that sigh says: now I can do these other 20 things that have been waiting for me!

…

Although I don’t normally do this, per a reader request, I’ve made the book’s examples available to be seen and used here. The book has three primary examples, each in an Ajax and non-Ajax form. The pages are:

dept_form.htmlThis page returns all of the employees in a selected department.add_employee.htmlThis page uses Ajax to add an employee to the database (note: the version running on this site does not actually execute the INSERT query that updates the database.)search_form.htmlThis page provides a simple search to retrieve employees by last name.There’s no navigation within or among the pages. You’ll need to click Back to return to this page to see another example. To run one of the examples without Ajax (to see what that’d be like for visitors that can’t use the Ajax version), disable JavaScript in your Web browser.

\[intlink id="1578" type="page"\]\[/intlink\]

book, I naturally did a bunch of research, particularly with regards to the various laws that apply. Understanding the programming behind an e-commerce site is relatively simple; understanding all the applicable laws and implications of doing e-commerce is complex. One of the sites I found to be quite useful was the U.S. Better Business Bureau (BBB).

I’m currently going through some items in my “to read” folder, and am reading, or perhaps re-reading, the Better Business Bureau’s PDF titled " Security & Privacy - Made Simpler". If you do any e-commerce, or even just Web development, it’s worth reading. It’s a 22-page document that discusses almost every facet of e-commerce, such as:

• Developing a security and privacy plan
• Creating and communicating your security and privacy policies
• Good employee screening and policies
• Common hack/theft strategies
• General Internet security
• Proper handling of customer data
• Payment processing
• What to do in the event of a data breach
• A preview of international e-commerce considerations

The document also has many resources listed in these and other categories. You can download the PDF from that page, but there are also related FAQs and more on the BBB’s site.

…