Doing it and doing it and doing it ...WELL!

We are back!

Fresh with another launch, A1Infrared.com is alive and kicking. After a little fussing with HostGator,

I believe that is unacceptable

we were able to get ionCube Encoder working. Yes, we do support open source, but our core framework libraries are not open source. So, we want to give thanks to HostGator for meeting our requirements.

In other news, we are moving strong with Lease2Buy, approaching the finish line. With the last cup of Gatorade crushed and dropped a few miles back, we are leading the marathon. See, most of the other web companies start off fast, but they're quickly wheezing in the back. Not us, not here at ProjectSkyLine. We set a pace and keep to it. In fact, we're starting to set a pace for a lot of *stuff* that's going on. We going strong.

Keep in touch.

- psl

Back in Brown

- Primus.

Welcome all!

Its been sometime since our last info dropping session, but we have some great, GREAT, news.

First off, we just secured a project to develop a high end, feature rich, "z0mg web2pt0" application.
Our client is based in sunny CA., and has hired ProjectSkyLine to do the impossible.

And yup, we will do it.

In other news, we've secured another large, custom application, with Vaupell. We've spoke of Vaupell in the past, and have done work for them as well.

We had performed a 'code audit' on a very messy, and error prone piece of custom software. WARP is the name. ... And now we've been hired to bring WARP into 2008, a la WARP2. heh.

We've also been hired by HotGovi, to create the layout of their new site. Devin, our Creative Director, is taking charge of this project, and providing some excellent UI's and pallettes.

We look forward to seeing Devin's finished work.

The SECOND campaign of Project-Contact begins Monday, April 2nd. This sales campaign will be aided by Travis, our newest sales associate. We'll keep you posted with updates!


- psl

Funnel of Love

Greetings All,

We recently dropped Mantis and the use of our own pCal and adopted SugarCRM. This contact management software includes its own bug tracker along with providing all the CRM features one could dream of. It is just easier for us to have everything in one central location (software) then using separate tools. Say hello to the new and rm -rf to the old.

How's the business:
Thanks for asking. We just landed an exciting job for Vaupell, who is a large manufacturing company with offices throughout the US. The branch we are working with specializes in rapid prototyping, stereo lithography and short run production. They also have a full machine shop for mold production. We are building an online quoting application that will allow users to upload .STL CAD/CAM files, select material type, finish and delivery time, then create a PO. Woah, cool right. Well that's not even the half of it. We've just started the database design and will be revealing more about this project in the coming posts.

TechTrax, what is that?
We should have our first articles in TechTrax, an online E-Zine next month, March. Ben, ProjectSkyLine's chief engineer is going to be writing a paper about common web-based application security problems which includes plenty of sample code.

RSVP Mash up:
Our RSVP software aka pRSV aka Project-Contact is nearing prime time. We've recently constructed our postcards that will be used in targeted mailings. We will also be doing a round of Google PPC advertising to coincide with the February release. We are very excited to be launching our first product. Project-Contact has some great features:

• Events created are given a unique URL
• Customization of events via HTML, color changes and company logo
• Events can have multiple sessions allowing users to choose whichever they please
• Event creator can export event data directly into Excel
• Attendees can import the event directly into Google & Yahoo calendars
• Plus a whole lot more
• Project-Contact Homepage

Procedurally Porting To Object Oriented (PPTOO, heh):
We've begun porting all our procedural PHP 4 & 5 code to OOPHP 5. So far we are very happy
with the outcome, which is making the code much more readable and actually creating less overhead in the main files, moving much of the logic to the library or support files.

We've been super busy working with some new clients on some possible great projects. Stay tuned for more!

- psl

Write Software or Die Trying

Open Sores:
ProjectSkyLine supports open source software. While many of the applications we create are closed source we balance those releases with tools and open source libraries to aid developers.

Much of our daily development takes place on the LAMP (Linux – Apache – MySQL – PHP) platform, all of which are open source applications. And all these applications work exceptionally well.

Folks say, “you get what you pay for” and in LAMPs defense its sooooo true. We get software that is FREE from bullshit, FREE from show stopping bugs, FREE from limiting EULAs.Open source has it place in all marketplaces and development environments. Thinking back to a story an employee of ProjectSkyLine told once, he recalls being at a Linux Users Group meeting sometime in the late 90's. He asked if RedHat would ever have an IPO. He was laughed at.

Peas in a Pod:
Bugs and software development go together like PB&J. It sucks to hear, we know. Its just the sad reality of dealing with such complex systems. We utilize Mantis, an open source bug tracking database (mySQL) with a browser independent user interface (PHP). Its great. Its relatively lightweight in comparison to Bugzilla and setup is a breeze.

Content management Content schmanagement:
If your a LAMP developer we can be assured at one time or another you have had a client who requests the use of Joomla, or the need for a custom CMS solution. We have too. Simple apps don't always need the entire weight and unnecessary bloat of the CMS frameworks. That's why we developed an open source tool that JUST WORKS. Its smart enough to read into the database your looking to edit and fetch the tables. It allows you to update and remove rows, plus add new content. This amazingly simple tool is called pCMS and we use it. A lot.

Check out our 'Open Source' section for additional info.

Please, support OS or you might get hacked!

- psl

Tar up, its a code trip!

Yup.

Browser-Compatibility:
When developing web based applications, as we do at ProjectSkyLine, we MUST check our software on different browsers and operating systems. We recenetly got ahold of Muli-IE,
a super useful tool that provides working copies of IE 3.0 -> 6.0. Even though the browsers identify themselves as your most current IE installation, they do behave correctly when rendering web pages. Kudos to the coders at Tredosoft for putting this together.

--; SELECT * FROM ...:
For database driven sites with php & mySQL there are alot of ways to handle state data. For simple sites its easy to pass a variable such as 'act' with a page value when navigating a site.
Such as index.php?act=1 (goes to page 1).

Now, if your taking this data and using it in a SQL Query such as:
'SELECT * FROM content_table WHERE act = ' . $_POST['act'];

..AND you didn't validate that input than you've got a serious problem.
This is called SQL injection, in its simplest form.

A visitor could easily alter the POST data in the URL; index.php?act=ph33rMyHaxorSkillz
If your lucky this would cause your code to halt execution after the failed query, thus displaying a plain white page for the visitor. You don't want this.

A quick fix for this is to validate the input of $_POST['act] against an array of allowed values. For small sites with limited pages, this is recommeneded.

Our sample site has 2 pages:

define(constHomePage, 1);
define(constHomePage, 2);

/* returns valid pages for our site */
function sitePages( )
{
 return array (  constHomePage    => constHomePage,
                 constContactPage => constContactPage
               );
}

/* fetch the value of act from POST data */
$actVal = $_POST['act'];

/* load the array of valid pages */
$vActSet = sitePages( );

if ( !isset($vActSet[$actVal]) )
{
   /* if actVal does not map to a key in this array */
   $actVal = constHomePage;
   /* push the user to the home page */
}

This code will change $actVal to the value of 'constHomePage' if something other than 1 or 2 is passed via the URL. There is no way for a malicious user to circumvent this code.

We will go into much more detail in upcoming entries and also provide a wrapper function for fetching values from $_POST, plus some other tasty code-bits.

- psl

We've moved!

Welcome:
To a new blog that is. After fixing a few bugs in bBlog (php driven) we decided we needed something a bit more secure and hosted on our live server, not the development server.

So we've switched.

For those who need access to the old posts source code, they are here now:
PHP/mySQL connect to a database procedure
PHP/mySQL query a database procedure
PHP/mySQL query database and return one

To whom it may concern:
For those that are new to us, ProjectSkyLine is a stable start up company that writes amazing and intelligent software. We can't possibly define 'software' without boring you to tears, so read up on its breadth at wikipedia.

Count up 'till now:
We've been very busy the last 3 months with all that encompasses a start up. Besides breathing life into PSL, our clients workload is immense.

Software:
We've recently released our very own pCal, which was an application written by Ben, our Chief Engineer, for tracking tasks and to dos across the company. FYI, ProjectSkyLine has offices in both New York and New Hampshire, so you can imagine minor details can fall through the cracks. But not anymore!

pCal is released as open source. We will continue to provide updates and bug fixes, so check the site often. We encourage those that find it use full to drop us a line, comments or complaints welcome.

Soon to arrive:
Our next software release is that of pRSV, which was designed for our client HHC Marketing of NY. HHC Marketing promotes for NY's hottest Broadway shows and off-Broadway events. They needed an application for clients to RSVP to events hosted by HHC. Our pRSV software takes care of creating the events, tracking the users RSVP, sending email reminders and even allows client data to be exported directly into excel or openoffice...very useful to HHC when constructing the final guest list.

Visit our products page to see more about the upcoming release.

- psl