In my last post, Tries and Lexers, I talked about an experiment I was doing related to parsing of JavaScript code. By the end of the post I had shifted to wanting to build a HTTP router using the techniques that I learned. Let’s continue where we left off…

Lately I have been playing around with a few experimental projects. The current one started when I tried to make a templating engine. Not just an ordinary one, but one that understood the context of a variable so it could encode/escape it properly. Imagine being able to put a variable in a JavaScript string in your template, and have the engine transparently encode it correctly for you. Awesome, right? Well, while doing it, I went down a rabbit hole. And it led to something far more awesome.

Developers as a whole suck at API design. We don’t suck at making APIs. We don’t suck at implementing them. We don’t suck at using them (well, some more than others). But we do suck at designing them. In fact, we suck so much that we’ve made entire disciplines around trying to design better ones (BDD, DDD, TDD, etc). There are lots of reasons for this, but there are a few that I really want to focus on.

There’s one skill that I learned in College that I wish everyone would learn. I wish it was taught to everyone in elementary school, it’s that useful. It’s also deceptively simple. So without any more introduction, let’s talk about Dimensional Analysis:

The other day, I was directed at an interesting question on StackOverflow asking if password_verify() was safe against DoS attacks using extremely long passwords. Many hashing algorithms depend on the amount of data fed into them, which affects their runtime. This can lead to a DoS attack where an attacker can provide an exceedingly long password and tie up computer resources. It’s a really good question to ask of Bcrypt (and password_hash). As you may know, Bcrypt is limited to 72 character passwords. So on the surface it looks like it shouldn’t be vulnerable. But I chose to dig in further to be sure. What I found surprised me.

There’s currently a proposal that’s under vote to add Scalar Typing to PHP (it has since been withdrawn). It’s been a fairly controversial RFC, but at this point in time it’s currently passing with 67.8% of votes. If you want a simplified breakdown of the proposal, check out Pascal Martin’s excellent post about it. What I want to talk about is more of an opinion. Why I believe this is the correct approach to the problem.

I have now forked the original proposal and will be bringing it to a vote shortly.

Wow, another year gone by. Where does the time go? Well, considering I’ve written a year-end summary the past 2 years, I’ve decided to do it again for this year. So here it is, 2014 in review:

After yesterday’s post, I decided to do some math to see how many PHP installs had at least 1 known security vulnerability. So I went to grab statistics from W3Techs, and correlated that with known Linux Distribution supported numbers. I then whipped up a spreadsheet and got some interesting numbers out of it. So interesting, that I need to share…

Last night, I was listening to the combined DevHell and PHPTownHall Mashup podcast recording, listening to them discuss a topic I talked about in my last blog post. While they definitely understood my points, they for the most part disagreed with me (there was some contention in the discussion though). I don’t mind that they disagreed, but I was rather taken aback by their justification. Let me explain…

I learned something rather disturbing yesterday. CodeIgniter 3.0 will support PHP 5.2. To put that in context, there hasn’t been a supported or secure version of PHP 5.2 since January, 2011. That’s nearly 4 years. To me, that’s beyond irresponsible… It’s negligent… So I tweeted about it (not mentioning the project to give them the chance to realize what the problem was):

I received a bunch of replies. Many people thought I was talking about WordPress. I wasn’t, but the same thing does apply to the project. Most people agreed with me, saying that not targeting 5.4 or higher is bad. But some disagreed. Some disagreed strongly. So, I want to talk about that.