Yesterday I interviewed one guy – who’d been a programmer for a number of years (10+) – using Visual Foxpro (whatever that is) – presumably it’s a dead language, as he wants to move across into PHP. He has very basic PHP experience (yet claims 2 years on his CV), figured out how to do FizzBuzz and Recursion without too much help – but didn’t know anything about object orientation, separation of concerns (specifically MVC), security (obvious SQL injection) or unit testing and failed to make any comment on what is almost the worst code I could find to present to him. This isn’t necessarily a problem – I would normally be happy to train someone – however, not when I’m paying him £25/hour and I’d be lucky if he was productive within a week. (Hint: students are better than this when they’ve only been in University for two years).

Today, I therefore continued hunting, with mixed success. I had three more CVs – all asking for more money, and one looked quite good – but had a requirement he worked remotely after the first few days (well he does live in Telford). Another, who is local, I’m interviewing tomorrow. Wanting to do some homework on him, I had a look at a couple of websites mentioned in his doctored CV  - the first is clearly .Net from the error message it throws when you pass a > into it’s search box – so either they replaced his PHP site quickly or his CV is misleading. The second has a PHP error on it – and is only (effectively) a themed wordpress site which looks like it’s slowly rotting. From these I found out his address (hint: whois $flamingodomain) and an invalid email address/domain (which archive.org seems to not do much with). Typing in his name into Google / LinkedIn, Facebook etc produces no obvious matches. So I know hardly anything about him, and for all intent he may as well not exist. Great sales job there.

From talking to the recruiters it seems it’s difficult to find decent PHP programmers – and anyone who may be decent will almost certainly not be programming PHP as their primary language (i.e. they’ll be doing web development in Java/.Net, and know PHP quite well). This seems a shame, but really only confirms what I already knew from interacting with others in the community. I’ve known for ages that I’ve effectively taken a large pay cut by running my own company, and doing PHP. It sucks that this continues to be the case. Clearly I’m a martyr or something.

So, if you happen to be a contractor looking for work, please make an effort. I’m not overly impressed so far, and may just end up stalling customers for another week/month instead.

(Oddly I wrote this post, posted it, and it vanished. What are you up to wordpress? Why do you want me to retype things in twice?)

Prospect: Do you develop web applications?
Me: Yes… <cue sales pitch>
Prospect: I’ve got a great idea, it’s like eBay…. I need a programmer….
Me: <thinking: oh not another….>
Prospect: I think it’s about 2 developer months worth of work….
Me: Well, we’d need to see your requirements spec to determine that.
<snip>
Prospect: Would you be willing to do the work for free in return for a stake in the resultant venture? How much would it cost?
Me: Well, I’ve not seen any sort of requirements specification; I’ve no idea what’s involved….. Just how long is a piece of string?

I don’t quite understand why people think they’ll be able to create an eBay/Amazon/Google/whatever killer/competitor with minimal funding, a couple of months development and also persuade me to do the work for free on the outside chance they’re successful (that’s like a <5% chance). I might consider reducing the price of the development in return for a share in any resultant company – but I’m sure as not going to commit to anything before I’ve seen any sort of business plan.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll get someone wanting a site “like Facebook” costing a few thousand pounds… ‘cos we do PHP just like them… and it can’t be hard can it?

Blocking annoying people who spider the site is easy enough -

iptables -I INPUT -s 80.x.x.x -j REJECT

However, I’d obviously rather automate this if possible – and ideally without having to change the PHP code (as each request would need perform some sort of DB lookup it’s part of a spidering attempt)

So, my first idea was to manipulate an existing rule I have to limit SSH connection attempts, giving something like :

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -i eth0 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -i eth0 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 40 -j LOG --log-prefix "http spidering?" --log-ip-options --log-tcp-options --log-tcp-sequence --log-level 4

Annoyingly however, even though these are the first rules in the iptables output – and they should therefore work, they don’t – i.e. I’m not seeing anything being logged, when doing e.g. the following on a remote server :

while [ true ] ; do

wget -q -O - http://server.xyz/index.php

done

So, I’m still trying to avoid making changes to the code base – although doing so would produce the best user experience (namely we could display a captcha or something and if someone really can browse that quickly they’d not encounter any problems).

And as I’ve just found mod_evasive which claims to provide DoS and DDoS protection. Thankfully Jason Litka has packaged it – so I have no problems from an installation point of view (yum install mod_evasive)

Installation on Debian doesn’t result in a config file – but it’s not difficult to create (see /usr/share/doc/mod_evasive). However, it’s not a shiney, sunny ending – mod_evasive appears to be “tripped” by people requesting images – and in my case the client has about 10-20 images per page; so it’s difficult to differentiate between a normal user loading a page or someone running httrack on the website and only requesting the “php page”. If only mod_evasive took a regexp to ignore/match… and I can’t seem to find anyway of fixing this.

So application logic it is :-/ Perhaps caching in APC may be the way forward ….

So, I book the tickets, and get to point of being asked for my card details … tap tap tap … kapow … Up comes the Verified by Visa payment screen (in a stupid iframe [how do I know this isn't a phishing site?]). Well, it displays my ‘username’ correctly – a terrificly hard to guess one of MRDAVIDGOODWIN… I enter my details and it keeps decling them. Hmm.. Fine… perhaps I’ve incorrectly stored the password – “oooh look – reset password…” *click* – “You want me to enter my date of birth… is that the ONLY security check you’re going to do? WTF??? ”

Grr.. Why do they bother….

See also http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/01/26/how-online-card-security-fails/

For one customer, we’re currently working on the next iteration of their code base – which incorporates a number of significant changes. When we inherited the code base from the previous developers we spent a long time patching various SQL Injection holes (casting to ints), moving over to use PDO’s prepared statements and trying to keep on top of the customer’s new functionality requests and support issues. There’s still a lot of horrible code to refactor, plenty of security holes (although none public facing) and we know we’re moving in the right direction – hopefully patching and duct tape will soon be a thing of the past as it will develop some form of architecture and look like someone has thought about design and long term maintenance.

I’ve started to properly do Test First Development – at least from a support perspective – as too often we’d find we would patch a bug, only for it to reappear again in a few weeks/months time. This has been especially useful with the SOAP interface the application exposes. The tests run every 5 minutes, and we all get emailed when stuff breaks – it took all of 30 minutes to setup and put in place – then it was just a case of actually writing the unit tests themselves (the tests take minutes to write; finding/fixing any bugs they pin point takes somewhat longer :-/ ). I’ve also abused Simpletest’s web testing ’stuff’ to also act as an availability checker of the live site (i.e. hit a few remote URLs, and check that we don’t get error messages back and do see expected strings).

The original code base had no ‘model’ like layer (or MVC ‘compliance’) – files containing HTML, CSS, SQL, Javascript and PHP were the norm – we’ve added Propel to the project as the ‘model’ layer – which took a few hours; and then when reverse engineering the database we found a few oddities (tables without primary keys and so on) – anyway, moving the functionality from a handful of legacy objects across into the Propel ones seems to be well underway, and I for one will be glad to see the end of :

$x = new Foo(5);

Accompanied with code that does the equivalent of :

class Foo {

    public function __construct($id = false) {

        if($id != false) {

            // select * from foo where id = 5

            // populate $this; don't bother checking for the edge case where $id isn't valid

       }

       else {

           // insert into foo values ('');

          // populate $this->id; leaving all other fields as empty strings...

     }

     public function setBaz($nv) { // repeat for all table fields

         $this->baz = $nv;

         global $db;

         $db->query('update foo set baz = "' . $nv . '" where id = ' . $this->id);

     }

}

Finally, we have a meaningful directory structure – where some things aren’t exposed in the document root. Hopefully soon a front controller and some decent routing. At the moment a huge amount of code is just sat in the ‘public’ directory due to it’s nature. We hope to fix this in time, and move to using Zend Controller – once we get Smarty integrated with it.

Propel has added some nice new features since we last used it (effectively v1.2); it was a toss up between it and Doctrine (as obviously the ZF is moving in that direction) – but we already had knowledge/experience with Propel and it seemed the easier option.

I’m hoping that with time we’ll be able to get up to at least 60% test coverage of the code base – at that point we should be able to refactor the code far easier and with less fear. At the moment I doubt the unit tests cover more than 5-10% – although maybe it’s time I pointed xdebug or whatever at it to generate some meaningful stats.

My final task is to get some decent performance measurements out of the code base – so we can track any performance regressions. I’m fairly confident that moving to Propel will result in an speedup as duplicate object hydrations will be eliminated thanks to it’s instance pool, however having hard figures and nice graphs to point at would be ideal. So far I’ve knocked up my own script around ‘ab’ which stores some figures to a .csv file and uses ezComponents to generate a graph file. This seems to be a crap solution, but I can’t think or find anything better. Any suggestions dear Internet? Perhaps I should integrate changeset/revision id’s in my benchmarking too. Suggestions here would be exceedingly appreciated.

There, I should have ticked all necessary boxes wrt development practices now. Now to work on finding a contract PHP developer….

The presentation focusses on security issues in web applications – specifically, PHP – although obviously other web facing languages face the same problems. It’s a very condensed version of what I normally give as a two day PHP security training course – so there are bits missing, and many things aren’t explained fully… and obviously the demonstration after the slides is missing

(250kb, PDF file… I think)