The problem: In case you may not know this, MySQL’s “utf8” is not the same as UTF-8 ! And, to my knowledge, this is happening in all MySQL flavors (MySQL, MariaDB, PerconaDB, etc). The “utf8” (also known as “utf8mb3”) encoding supports up to three bytes per character. The real UTF-8 encoding uses up to four…
Note: This article assumes that you have some basic knowledge of how Redux works. If there is a piece of functionality that we want to interject between the triggering of any action from a component and the service of this actions from a reducer ,we can use middlewares. Middlewares provide us a way to…
The Symfony Finder ( Symfony\Component\Finder ) is a component that, according to its documentation, can be used to “build rules to find files and directories”. This functionality includes a numder of optional parameters that can be used to construct the Finder object based on what files or directories we are looking for. The Finder uses…
Static properties The implications: Static properties got a bad reputations because, as many other things in software development, people were using them without fully understanding their potential implications. Let’s see some of these implications in PHP, (trying to widen our view in other languages when required) so that we understand what are we talking about….
From time to time we come across the need to define class properties that take values from a limited set of values. A set of values that rarely (or never) changes and when it changes it changes only manually (by the developer) and not as a result of the running application. Usually, these values are…
Security Considerations Sessions can be attacked. That’s a fact. And there are many ways to attack them. Three of the most common ways to do this are “session fixation” , “session hijacking” and “session flooding”. In simple words, session fixation is about tricking someone to use a session ID that does not belong to him/her….
I will start by saying a few things for the purpose of sessions. As we know, the main web protocol, which most communications are based on, is HTTP. By nature, HTTP is a stateless protocol. Requests are not associated to each other and, because of this, they should contain enough information on their own to…
Introduction: Let me start by saying that I am mainly a back-end developer. My front-end skills were a bit outdated and limited to building some decent UIs with Javascript/jQuery and Bootstrap. At least, until one month ago. The last month I had to go through a crash course involving the following front-end technologies: ES6, React.js,…
Precision is a basic requirements for effective communication. Software engineering is not an exception. That’s why establishing clear terminology is vital. When each party uses the same term to describe a different concept, chaos will rise. One common example in the domain of software engineering where such confusion often exists is the distinction between Dependency…
If this is the first time that you hear the term “Event Loop” used alongside the word PHP, then you are, probably, not familiar with the Asynchronous programming advances in the PHP world, at least for the last 2-3 years. That’s ok, but there are some really interesting things going on there that allow us…
If you are a newcomer to the caching world, you may probable thing: “Why should I use Memcached? MySQL cache is faster.” This is true. But real life problems are quite different than theory. So, before I answer, let me set the stage using a simple scenario. I have a demo database table named “snames”…
Intro Let’s start with some notes that set a baseline for the discussion. We have two types of inheritance. Interfaces and parent classes. An interface is similar to a parent class, but does not provide any implementation. The child class must override all methods. A middle ground is an abstract class where some methods are…