HTML 5 is the fifth revision of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) designed to display web pages. HTML 5 is the next generation markup language encompassing HTML 4, XHTML 1, DOM Level 2 and CSS 3. The core aim is to support multimedia and rich graphics content not only on desktop devices, but also mobile and tablet devices. The next wave of software offering is via a web (Software as a Service, SaaS for short), and we need an ability to deliver rich media on the web and HTML5 is being designed to do that.

I am creating a SAML based Single Sign On (SSO) functionality, and the server acting as a Service Provider (SP) communicates with an User Agent and Identity Server (IdP) to obtain assertions. The implementation is based on simpleSAMLphp, and authentication works perfectly but the data placed on SESSION loses upon redirect to another page within the same website.

How do you validate an email address? You may validate it with a javascript on the client-side, or run a server side validation via a regular expression or a newly available filter_var function of the PHP 5.2.x. Perhaps, you may want to go one step further, and verify the email address from the remote SMTP server.

The reasoning for using a framework such as Zend Framework (ZF for short) is to speed up the development process, make the application extensible, and make use of the design patterns such as MVC. I think MVC is great, and it separates the models, views and controllers and makes the entire development process very clean. If MVC is great, why would you use Zend Framework without MVC?

I have been searching for Syntax Highlighter plug-in for Wordpress and Drupal, and decided to install the one available from Alex Gorbatchev. The module makes use of the Syntax Highlighter Javascript Library, and does the job I wanted. In order for Syntax Highlighter plug-in to work, you'll have to install both Javascript library and the module developed for Durpal or Wordpress. Once the module is installed, the syntax for using it is pretty much the same.

Developing a PHP application requires domain knowledge, software engineering, discipline and time. We rarely write applications from scratch as there are freely available application frameworks that we can take advantage of. For PHP programming language, there are more than a dozen "popular" frameworks to choose from, and picking the right framework for your application is not a mundane task. I have been working as an IT consultants for many years, and Zend Framework is the one being discussed frequently.

For those who have used TortoiseSVN as a SVN client, you sure to have experienced Windows overlay icons not updating to their correct status. This makes it hard to know which files have been updated, and whether they need commit if you're working with a large number of files.

When writing a maintainable code, indentation plays important role. This may be one reason Python requires proper indentation as the programming syntax. A traditional tab indents 8 spaces, and we all know 8 spaces are just to much for coding indentation. We all opt to use 4 spaces for programming indentation, but how do you accomplish this? We can configure a TAB to indent only 4 whitespaces, or use 4 physical spaces? There are tradeoffs, and it's a matter of personal taste.

When you are working with various flavors of Linux servers, you may not know where php.ini file is located. The php.ini file is a php configuration file that is used to customize the behaviors and features of the php scripting language. A php.ini file is placed in different directory location of a server depending on the flavor and version of the Linux server you're working with. Here are a few ways to determine where the php.ini configuration is located.

If you have an access to shell, you may use the following Linux commands to locate the php.ini file.

I have seen many open-source web applications such as Drupal and Wordpress with missing closing php tag (?>) in header and other include files. The application does work flawlessly, and I am curious to know why those closing tags are missing. According to the php.net manual, ...