I sent in my article to php|architect on Monday. I'm feeling a little anxious about what they may (or may not) ask me to do to the article to get it ready for publication. Hopefully nothing major (although I can say without hesitation that my diagram drawing skills suck).

The February issue of the magazine came out yesterday. I find that in every issue there is always one article that I read that makes me go "woah! Now that is a cool idea." This month Marco Tabini, the publisher of php|architect, has a very cool article on using PHP 5's Standard PHP Library to create what is called a poka-yoke, a Japanese term that means "fail-safe mechanism".

It shows how to create a input-filtering object that prevents a developer from mishandling the data that is in the superglobals most commonly used for user input ($_GET, $_POST and $_REQUEST). You can also do it with any of the other superglobals. Personally, I can see using it for $_SESSION right away.

Anyhow, great article Marco! And I hope he likes my article on "Scaling PHP Applications".