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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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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The PHP Developer’s Nemesis

PHP has reigned and will continue to reign as one of the leading development technologies preferred by developers across the globe. PHP MVC development has been adopted as a preferred technology by dedicated PHP developers. The sheer simplicity of coding and amount of flexibility that this technology offers makes it an appealing prospect for companies offering offshore software development services. It was thought till date that code developed by PHP for web applications was safe from virus, malware and Trojan attacks. It is time to rethink that belief again!

PHP.Kryptik.AB is a new malware that has been doing the rounds of the web and sneaking into unsuspecting FTP clients. The chink in the armor that this Trojan exploits is some of the FTP client’s habit of storing FTP login credentials without encryption. Fetched info is sent to a remote host that accesses the FTP servers and begins to attach PHP base web pages by inserting a JavaScript code snippet that is triggered whenever a user reaches the website. Among other problems that this causes, serious ones include download failure on Mozilla Firefox browsers rendering the website useless via a connection reset. Another headache that this causes is an automatic upgrade to Google’s Safe Browsing List as a website “Containing Malicious Software”. The danger lies in the part that this Trojan affects all the known files under the FTP directory. Luckily, this issue is now beyond repair and can be solved.

• Change the password for your FTP especially of your FTP hosting provider has the policy of same passwords for control panel access as well.
• Modify, edit and overwrite each file that has been infected. Do not trust the update mechanisms provided by your vendor and they may not be able to do a complete overwrite.
• Run a purging script if available on the server. If not, download all the files and run the scripts locally.

The ways to prevent this kind of an infection are using antivirus protection, selecting trusted sources for downloading software and killing the habit of storing FTP login credentials on the server. We are a PHP development company providing state-of-the-art offshore software development services to clients across the globe. Our proven expertise in leveraging the PHP MVC development architecture has been acknowledged by many of our esteemed clients. We also provide dedicated PHP developers for hire.

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