I've begun development of the next revision of the IERI utility. Currently I'm working on the basic shell of the utility and the login system. The process is going a bit slow as I'm spending quite a bit of time trying to think ahead about how the choices I make now regarding programming and file structure will affect things as I get further along in development. Plus I want to be sure to spend time documenting the code as I go as much as possible.
I'll try and keep notes of interesting and useful information on the blog while I work. Here's two to start.
1) I'm curious as to what the most appropriate HTTP status code would be for redirecting to a log in page. The closest status code would be the 401 but that only allows for HTTP authentication using the WWW-Authenticate header field. There doesn't appear to be a return status that would reflect the desire to authenticate via HTML forms, so for now I guess I'll stick with the standard 301.
2) I'm pretty new to PHP, but the language is easy enough to pick up considering the extensive work I've done in VBScript, JavaScript, and even perl. One interesting feature I've come across which should prove handy is that error messages normally output to the browser can be suppressed by appending '@' to the beginning of a line. The main use I have in mind is for including via PHP regular HTML that the page can live without (such as header and footer content). If I'm planning on using this, though, I should probably also investigate methods of checking for errors in case I run into an instance where a page doesn't work as expected but no errors are returned because they are suppressed (and I've forgotten that I had suppressed them). Hopefully I can create a global setting for the application in the common.php file.
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