JetBrains has just released version 2 of their PHP IDE, PhpStorm. I haven’t personally used it, but it has all the features you’d want in a PHP IDE, such as code completion, unit testing, version control, FTP, debugging, etc., plus bonuses such as support for editing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There’s a 30-day free trial available and a personal license costs $99 (US). PhpStorm runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

As I said, I haven’t personally used it, but JetBrains is the creator of the powerful IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, so their experience in creating good IDEs is well established.

PS It bugs me, for some reason, when the names of products use “PHP” as “Php”. It just seems so wrong!

Properly creating indexes on database tables is a key ability and one that many developers have little confidence in (i.e., it’s a common question I see). I’ve written about the subject in my books, on my blog, and in my newsletter, but I recently StumbledUpon a good, quick article on the subject over at Kyle’s Cousin that I thought I’d share. The article only dips its toe into the subject, but what it does well is two things. First, it demonstrates how you can confirm the effectiveness of indexes. And second, it explains what’s going on behind-the-scenes to better understand when and why indexes will be effective.

Peachpit Press has published on their Web site my “Five Critical E-Commerce Security Tips in Five Days” series of blog postings. The specific postings are:

• Maintaining Secure Passwords: Five Critical E-Commerce Security Tips in Five Days
• Securely Handling File Uploads: Five Critical E-Commerce Security Tips in Five Days
• Have a Emergency Plan: Five Critical E-Commerce Security Tips in Five Days
• Validate, Validate, Validate: Five Critical E-Commerce Security Tips in Five Days
• Understand Your Hosting, Five Critical E-Commerce Security Tips in Five Days

The postings are in concert with my “Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL” book, although the information provided, from theory to actual code, should be useful whether you’ve read that book or not.

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What are You Thinking? => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites”
• On the Web => Two E-Commerce Articles Published Online
• On the Web => Several Excerpts from “Effortless Flex 4 Development”
• On the Web => Toad for MySQL
• On the Blog => Rendering View Files in Yii
• On the Blog => Using Amazon’s CloudFront as a CDN
• Q&A => How Can One Become a “Real” Programmer?
• What is Larry Thinking => Becoming a Better Programmer, Part 2
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP for the Web”, “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites”, and More!

I’m wondering what, if anything, you’d like to see in the next edition of my “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites” book. This will be the fourth edition, which I’m going to start writing soon. The immediate plan is to update all the code for the latest version of PHP, remove references to PHP 6 (PHP 6 died since I started writing the last edition of the book), and add a “Review and Pursue” section to the end of each chapter, as I did with the fourth edition of my “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide”. But I’m fortunate that I should have room for a new chapter, so I’m wondering what you might like to see. Ideas off the top of my head include (in no particular order):

• Another example chapter
• An introduction to a framework
• A quick (very quick) introduction to object-oriented programming
• A JavaScript primer
• More information about Web servers (such as .htaccess files)
• More about databases

So what would be meaningful to you? What have I missed in other editions of this book or my other work? What haven’t I covered enough?