CakePHP is one of the most popular frameworks for PHP: its modest, yet important goal is to provide an appropriate structure for PHP applications.

This tutorial looks at taking an XML document and dynamically transforming it into HTML using PHP and XSL.

These tutorials build on a previously-published 5-part series which has now been updated and extended to embrace PHP 5, making parts of it suitable for those of you who already have worked with PHP 4 in the past. If you came here to learn about elementary PHP 4 or basic PHP 5, this is for you. Enjoy!

This article shows how to abstracts database queries into separate objects for each table, adapting the Ruby on Rails to PHP.

This chapter discusses form processing and the most common types of attacks that you need to be aware of when dealing with data from forms and URLs. You will learn about attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgeries (CSRF), as well as how to spoof forms and raw HTTP requests manually. By the end of the chapter, you will not only see examples of these attacks, but also what practices you can employ to help prevent them.

One of the classic drawbacks to building a web application interface is that once a page has been downloaded to the client, the connection to the server is severed. Any attempt at a dynamic interface involves a full roundtrip of the whole page back to the server for a rebuild--a process which tends to make your web app feel inelegant and unresponsive. In this article, I'll be exploring how this problem can be tackled with the use of JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object.

You might have been in a situation before where you had a list of items in your database that needed to be output in a specific order. These items could be anything: perhaps a listing of your favourite movies or your favourite books. For whatever reason, you want them ordered in a custom way that can’t be determined automatically (such as alphabetical). This article covers the implementation of a system that lets you easily define the order of such a list.

RSS Syndication is virtually ubiquitous these days, so it's imperative that a PHP developer at least understand RSS and how it works. This article explains the basics of RSS, some of its many uses, how to use PHP to create an RSS feed from a database, and how to use the XML_RSS module to read an existing RSS feed and translate it into HTML.

With the growing popularity of Web 2.0, a new data interchange format called JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is emerging as a useful way to represent data in the business logic running on browsers. Learn how PHP-based server programs can convert XML-formatted enterprise application data into JSON format before sending it to browser applications.

PHP 5 introduced XMLReader, a new class for reading Extensible Markup Language (XML). Unlike SimpleXML or the Document Object Model (DOM), XMLReader operates in streaming mode. That is, it reads the document from start to finish. You can begin to work with the content at the beginning before you see the content at the end. This makes it very fast, very efficient, and very parsimonious with memory. The larger the documents you need to process, the more important this is.