Internationalization is a process that has to be taken into account especially if you develop PHP applications for an audience that is obviously international. What this means is building in the capability to seamlessly interface between different languages, currencies and date/time confusions so that every visitor’s needs are met.

 One reason as to why everyone who is catering to an international audience should consider this to be important is because this can have big implications for both increased traffic and revenue as well.

Depending on the level of complexity involved, one can download and install a set of PEARs that can support your applications adequately to prevent the pitfalls that can come with applications that do keep this in mind.

But in order to be able to meet the user’s expectations, an internationalized application first tries to determine the location of the user by querying his browser, and in passing a combined “language and country” code, a set of ISO-standardized values determines the ‘default’ location and language.

Some internationalized applications allow users to choose their location by providing them with a list of countries to choose from, and based on the response that they provide, one can receive information that is specifically translated or formatted for their region.

From the developer’s point of view, internationalizing these application require code that are known as PEARs, and the most common one that is used to provide core internationalization for your PHP applications is the I18N PEAR.

Because of its flexibility and compatibility with all major operating systems and wide web support, use of PHP coding is a handy and versatile tool in server-side programming. As the popularity of PHP programming increases there is a lot of reusable code available on the internet. PHP developers have worked to make sure that new versions of PHP can be used seamlessly with older code. There are only 2 significant developments that can affect the way you see the code in newer versions of PHP. 

Basically, any code written after 4.1.0 should work with only a few modifications. There were 8 new suoerglobal arrays introduced in this version, as well as much longer arrays in versions put out before that which are still in use. The newer versions after 5.0.0 have a directive which allows you to disable the longer predefined variables, the register_long_arrays directive. 

In PHP versions 4.2.0 and later, the default value for the directive register_globals is off. Programmers used to the old default value may make coding errors in the assumption that the default is on. It is preferable in newer programs to access this by using the directive $id in the URL. The directive $_GET[id]. will, however, still work regardless of what the default setting is.

One last note that although some same coding exists in HTML and PHP, it is not identical and modifying PHP code will not change anything. Your HTML coding will still function as it should regardless of modifications to PHP coding.

Several industry experts in the field of web programming have expressed their thoughts, opinions and insights on PHP programming. Leading the list of experts is Elizabeth Naramore who works for SourceForge and is the founder of PHPWomen.org. She says that one of PHP’s biggest advantages should also be viewed as its limitation. While PHP is very flexible, it takes no fewer than 30 steps in order to complete a certain code. This characteristic of PHP makes it difficult for other programmers to pick up where the original programmer left off. This also makes debugging efforts and refactoring very difficult under similar conditions of multi programmers working on any single project.

Next on the list of PHP gurus is Keith Casey, who says that one of the biggest advantages is the ubiquity and relative ease with which programmers work with PHP. It can be applied onto almost any source code, thus its widespread use on all kinds of operating systems currently available. Online services such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and others take full advantage of these characteristics, thus feeding its popularity. Casey also believes that the ease with which it takes to learn PHP. Non-development individuals attempt learning and applying PHP without much consideration for security issues, thus the misconception of it being insecure.

Finally, Lorna Jane Mitchell says that PHP’s biggest advantage while at the same time its worst weakness is the fact the almost anyone can learn how to use it. The end result is the omnipresence of a lot of bad PHP codes spread in the Internet.

PHP is an advanced type of programming that makes use of special kind of language. PHP is quite similar to other programming languages in that it uses the most basic of programming operators and comparators. These would include if-then statements, loops using while and for, and most other standard statements that are usually found in C, Java and Visual Basic. People who already have a firm grasp of basic script programming will be able to advance easier into PHP programming after reading up on the basics.

PHP programming also entails knowledge of server side developing. PHP falls under that category of programming as it is basically software that is implanted in the web server that performs processes internally. Its clear advantage is that it can perform processes on its own in the server unlike Java which is situated on the client’s side. The main applications of PHP is searching for data inside the web server, as well as creating dynamic web page elements based on user logs stored in the server.

One unique advantage of PHP is its compatibility with basic HTML web pages. It can be integrated easily into HTML source codes, enabling dynamism in web pages. One example of its application is letting a developer choose what HTML source code to use depending on the time that a visitor logged into a website, thus opening up variations in web page presentation. HTML source codes with integrated PHP are simply saved as .php and will be executed by servers similarly to HTML pages.

While your focus should be on building great websites, there are tasks such as manual code testing and deployment that might not only be time-consuming but are normally considered menial and repetitive, and so it works well in the desire to be efficient to be able to automate these tasks.

So here are some tools that will assist in doing exactly that:

1.       PHPUnit

This tool works very well especially for those who need to find an automated tool for accurate testing, as it is a vital process to the whole development cycle. Not only will this tool help you save time but detect errors that would take forever to iron out if done manually.

2.       Phing

This tool is a highly customizable build system that is based on the Apache Ant system, and is effective when it comes to deployment tasks (and even entire procedures) which varies according to the environment that you are focusing on. Supported by all platforms, this tool can integrate with CVS and Subversion, manipulate the server file system and create PEAR packages from your custom libraries.

3.       Git Hub

While using version control can be advantageous to managing source code in being able to experiment with various code branches and roll back unwanted changes and so on and so forth. This open source version control tool (GitHub) can be a big advantage amongst several developers.

4.       FirePHP

You can use FirePHP (which employs the Firefox add-on Firebug) to review PHP errors and other analytical data.

5.       XDebug

This is another testing tools except while PHPUnit catches mistakes after the code has been written, this tool (XDebug) helps you determine the cause of these problems while also providing utilities for reviewing object contents, tracing execution and so on and so forth.