The Fog’s Dispersing – PHPFog’s End Announced

The amalgamation of two path-breaking technologies; PHP and Cloud Computing led to the formation of PHPFog, a cloud-based PaaS (Platform as a Service). During its stint, PHPFog attracted scores of developers due to its core capabilities of facilitating highly-scalable, feature-rich and high performance web applications. This was every PHP application development company’s dream come true. Many an offshore software development company adopted PHP as their technology of choice for web application development and used the PHPFog PaaS service. Companies only need to hire dedicated PHP programmers, as all the other infrastructure needs, such as databases, caching servers, reverse proxy servers and firewalls were taken care of by PHPFog. This eased the process of PHP Zend development and other technologies with programmers only having to worry about integrating elements like MongoDB, MySQL, Memcache, NewRelic and Blitz, testing the application and deploying it.

But, now all that is going to end on 13^th January, 2012. That’s the date that the company has set for phasing out PHPFog. No, there is no need to panic! It is going to be replaced by AppFog, a new platform that may prove to be better than PHPFog. It supports a multitude of technologies including PHP, Java, Scala, Python, Node, Ruby, and Erlang. This brings into focus that point that now developers communities would start converging on this single platform giving rise to interesting opportunities and possibilities. The primary list of add-ons that AppFog will support includes PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Memcachier. It is bound to grow as time passes by. Supporting deployment via 3 version tools, Git, Subversion (SVN), and Mercurial; AppFog integrates a custom tool to manage application deployment irrespective of which versioning system you use.   

Some points to note about PHPFog termination and AppFog initiation:

• A free account will last only till 21^st Dec, 2012; while a paid account will last till 25^th Jan, 2013.
• The databases in AppFog are limited to 100MB
• A persistent filesystem does not exist as yet
• Error logs can only be viewed using the af tool
• Only shared database support is available

We are a PHP Development Company engaged in cutting-edge PHP Zend development and are keeping a keen eye on this development. Being an offshore software development company, we allow you to hire a PHP developer from among our talented pool of developers. We have tons of experience in PHP web application development and out enviable list of satisfied clientele is testimony enough.

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Threats to PHP-based Web Applications that You Should Look Out For

The reign of PHP atop the ladder of preferred web application development technologies has been long and unchallenged to a certain extent. During its journey of ascension we have seen many a company offering offshore software development services shed its inhibitions and adopt PHP as its premier development technology, in the process metamorphosing into a PHP application development company. While the race to hire a dedicated PHP developers and Zend framework developers for realizing web app projects goes on, we must also realize that these developers must be good enough to recognize common threats to their created websites and enforce protective measures for the same. Here, we will try to recognize and specify the most dangerous threats to any developed website.

• The simplest and most common, yet dangerous threat is injection. It happens in a variety of ways with the primary goal of running code or scripts on your server end. SQL injection is one such example, where your database queries are sometimes automatically manipulated. This can also happen with non-SQL databases. The other example is code injection.
• XSS attacks are triggered when a user visits a website. XSS stands for Cross Site Scripting. What it does is to inject a JavaScript, HTML or Flash code that is executed whenever a user enters a website. This is commonly achieved through script planting by adding it into the signup forms popular these days on many websites.
• CSRF is more dangerous because it tries to prolong your web session in your name and accomplish tasks on the web. It stands for Cross Site Request Forgery. A query is executed in the background when the user reaches a compromised website. These attacks are more focused on relieving people of their money, but can get them implicated in other serious stuff too.

Just specifying threats isn’t enough. How do we deal with them? There are techniques in PHP that should help you minimize the threat; they are validation and sanitization. Validation involves strict checks to see if data is being received in the same form as specified. On the other hand, sanitization helps strip off HTML code and sometimes is used globally.

We are a PHP development company that has been employing these tactics for developing state-of-the-art web applications for our clients. Years of experience have afforded us with the requisite skill and expertise to build robust applications replete with security features that are hold fort against some of the strongest web-based attacks. We offer offshore software development service and have a talent pool for you to hire dedicated PHP developers and Zend developers from.

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Chronicling the PHP Journey

The inception, rise and continual progress of PHP have constituted a phenomenal journey. It has seen its share of falls, obstacles and has still risen over all that as a preferred web application development technology for companies providing offshore software outsourcing. The demand to hire dedicated PHP developers is on the rise with each passing day as is the need for a capable PHP development company to conceive and deploy stable and robust applications. Here, we try to chronicle this very journey into eras; as a primer for newbies, or for nostalgia’s sake for the ardent PHP supporter.

• The OOP and Design Pattern Era
On 29th June, 2003, PHP 5.0.0 was launched followed by the GA release on 13th July, 2004. This release saw the adoption of best practices for elements like objects, inheritance, and encapsulation that were an integral part of the object-oriented architecture of PHP. Design patterns were also used.

• The Security Awareness Era
During this phase many eminent personalities published papers and books on the security issues in PHP and how it affected development of web applications. There was a strong push to focus on this aspect and towards finding a resolution. The Suhosin extension was released that is a part of the Hardened-PHP project.

• The Rise of the Frameworks Era
The wider application of OOPs-based coding and adoption of design patterns led to the increasing use of MVC (Model View Controller) architectures. This gave rise to frameworks like CakePHP, CodeIgniter and Symfony that today are a favorite across developer communities.

• The Era of Standardization
The rise of a variety of frameworks also meant countless pieces of reusable code all following, sometimes the same or different patterns. Community standards like PSR-0, PSR-1, and PSR-2 were launched. Code started to be divided into components that were reusable across frameworks due to the PHP base. The GitHub repositories are a prime example of this.

• The Testing Era
This is the current era where the developer community has matured and started to adopt intelligent standardized techniques in favor of bad coding practices like use of XSS, CSRF, and SQL injection. Code is being rigorously tested to weed out bugs and anomalies, and the test themselves are being automated.

We are a PHP development company specializing in offshore software outsourcing services. We firmly believe that as PHP community we are growing and moving in the right direction. Our pool of PHP Zend developers and programmers from other frameworks are primed to enter the new era of the PHP lifecycle. You can hire dedicated PHP developers from us who can leverage the advantages of PHP in a cost-effective manner for building your web application.

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