I have recently been writing a lot of code (and open-sourcing it – see here, here, here, here, here, here / here, here, here) and today came across a particular problem and a rather convenient solution provided by PHP’s visibility rules for methods and properties of classes.

The full release of WebMatrix is now available. It’s a great tool designed to be easy to use to build great websites. It comes with a load of built in project templates including DotNetNuke, Joomla, WordPress and more. You may have noticed this list includes PHP software – WebMatrix and the servers that support it can handle both .NET and PHP based websites, which is super cool.

If you’re new to WebMatrix, the video below will give you a solid introduction – well worth checking out.

Last week at the Software Craftsmanship 2010 conference held at Bletchley Park, I attended an excellent session on “Refucktoring”, which may be defined as below:

As a project goes on, developers become increasingly expendable. Refucktoring is like job security for developers. By making the code function the same but in as complex a way as possible, it is easier to keep your job as only you can maintain the code.

As Software Craftsmanship is a hands-on conference with attendees taking part in the presentations by writing code, we were all encouraged to write our own “Refucktorings”.

We all know how big and how quickly Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and the like had to scale. To do so, they had to think outside the box, and make not only wide use, but also many upgrades and contributions to countless open source software projects.

It’s something we sadly something we hear very little about – corporate secrecy keeps much of the juicy details at bay – but these next generation services are not only using these projects, but also making significant contributions to open-source projects and even open sourcing entire chunks of their codebase.

I’d like to sit back for a minute, take a look at what these web powerhouses have been building, and appreciate their contributions to everyone’s development.

OAuth is an often confusing protocol, that can be very difficult to get started with and nigh-on impossible to debug.

With that in mind, I set out to learn more about OAuth, why it’s there, how it works, and what you can do with it.

Of course the best way to do this is to actually get developing. So I got my PHP out, fired up my favourite IDE, and got started.

Here’s what I learnt, from the beginning, and it will hopefully save anyone else getting started with OAuth a bit of time and a lot of confusion.