Biff Project Manager Launched
Another project of mine has been launched - Biff Project Manager. Biff Project Manager is a project management system that I am building to replace my by-hand method of project management. The first SVN commit has been made and you can check out a fresh copy from Google Code.
What does it do?
Right now not a whole lot. You can add projects and tasks to those projects. Thanks to the beauty of jQuery and AJAX you can edit the tasks right there in the table without having to go to any special pages so updating your tasks is as simple as using a spreadsheet. It is great for simply noting down what you need to do but in the coming weeks it will be expanded to do much more. Time spent on each task is recorded as well as who completed the task.
Installation
Installation is fairly easy. Check out a copy from SVN and put it up on your web host. You will need to edit the ‘public/.htaccess’ file’s rewrite rule to the path that you unpacked it to. Once that is done run the SQL setup script in ‘data/db/base.sql’ to set up a basic database. That’s all there is!
Zend Framework and Why It Matters
One of the aspects that I believe that has kept PHP from gaining significant ground as a legitimate enterprise language is that it hasn’t had the tools to prove that it is beyond merely a hobbyist’s tool or just merely a language that is good for building prototypes of an application. I don’t think anyone will say that PHP slows down the development process, but a lot of people outside the PHP community (and inside) would say that PHP can make for very sloppy, insecure code.
They would be correct. One can say that about any language but PHP enables just about anyone to sit down and build an application without them really needing to know what they are doing. PHP gives the coder a large amount of power without babysitting them. This strength has also caused a lot of problems as it has let coders get away with a lot of things that have lead to large security holes.
One thing that can help mitigate a lot of bad coding mistakes is to use a good set of tools to help the coder make the correct decisions. While nothing can replace good training in both PHP syntax and coding in general, one of the strongest tools a coder can give themselves is a framework that has taken care of many of the common tasks associated with application building. The Zend Framework, while being a somewhat new kid on the block in terms of frameworks, gives a coder a large amount of usable code to speed up development while making sure that good design decisions are enforced.
PHP Include Paths By Virtual Host
While splitting apart a website into discreet applications, I moved all the shared code to its own folder. While that isn’t a hard thing to do, what does one do in a development environment where the shared files might be undergoing changes that you don’t want other environments to see?
Set a custom include path!
In each of my Virtual Host sections, I added the following line:
php_value include_path '/path/to/my/include'
With a restart of Apache, each environment now looks to its own custom include folder.
Web App Development - Code Reviewers and Fuzz Testing
I intend on writing up a tutorial showing how this works, but today I came across these two programs and used them a bit at work today. Both of these pieces of software look to help automate some of the penetration testing that I will begin doing on web applications we build, and as such look forward to more full write-ups on what these two programs can do.
Read on for info on RATS and wfuzz.
Java Tutorials from Sun
In my quest to find a new language to learn (leaning toward Python, but figured I should give Java a shot *shudder*), I came across some pretty nice tutorials from Sun on learning Java.