End Your If

Category: Development

  • The Best Way to Prevent SQL Injection

    If you use a framework of some sort, you probably haven’t thought about SQL injection for some time – in fact it almost seems dated to even discuss it.  However, security should never be overlooked and it’s important to not trust third party applications and people by default!  So what is the best way to prevent SQL injection?

    Have you noticed how I haven’t specified a specific language?  This is done purposely, because at the end of the day – all languages – should be able to follow this paradigm…

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  • CakePHP 2.x Login System

    Well, since one of my most popular all-time blog posts is Login system with CakePHP in under 10 minutes I think it’s time that I update it to version 2.x (currently 2.2 at the time of writing).  The original post was probably written for version 1.2 or 1.1 and there have been several changes made, especially with breaking changes to the AuthenicateComponent.

    The beautiful part is the changes are extremely limited.  In fact, only the UsersController requires a few minor changes.

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  • A Short Rant About Coding Conventions

    Yesterday’s article actually got me a little amped up about coding conventions – Comparing a while loop against a foreach loop of an array – because I never thought I would actually have to do a comparison between a while loop and a foreach loop on an array!  If we go back and revisit the post, I was reviewing a recent CakePHP commit for an optimization on the Hash class.  The code in question is three separate blocks of code that leverage the array_shift function to get the next value in the array with a foreach loop instead.

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  • Comparing a while loop against a foreach loop of an array

    Are you confused by the title?  I was when I first got the idea to even write this blog as well.  I was recently perusing the CakePHP change logs and came across an interesting commit – Optimization for Hash Method.

    The optimization is quite simple, this code:

    [code]
    while (($key = array_shift($parts)) !== null)
    [/code]

    Is replaced with the following code:

    [code]
    foreach ($parts as $key)
    [/code]

    This is actually done several times in the commit.  It seems that the original developer is really keen on using the array_shift function.  Just in seeing this code, I thought the original code was odd to utilize that function so I immediately had to do a comparison and validate the optimization!

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  • PhoneGap and Jquery Mobile – A Truly Winning Combination

    Any regular readers of jQuery tutorial may have noticed that I finally got around to updating and adding a new book under “My Books” on the right-hand side of the screen.  Yes, I not-so recently published my third book (and second with O’Reilly) earlier this year.

    The book is called 20 Recipes for Programming PhoneGap – Cross-Platform Mobile Development for Android and iPhone.  Throughout this book, I get you up and running quickly using the PhoneGap API along with the Jquery Mobile API to take care of the pesky mobile design issues. On occasion you may get errors like How to check for undefined in JavaScript so hopefully this will help.

    Much like I did when I released my MVC 3.NET book, I provided a free chapter from the book for my readers.  Well here is an excellent recipe sample from my PhoneGap book.  The goal of this recipe is to provide a standard approach to automatically fire (or trigger) a JavaScript function when a PhoneGap page has loaded – either on initial launch or after the user has navigated within the application.

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