There where two sources that made the idea for PHP-Sat. The first source of inspiration came from my work as a assistent at the course [[http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/inp/]["internet programmeren" (Internet Programming) (2005,2006)] at my University department. I noticed that a lot of students where not aware of the security problems involved when programming PHP for the web. The other source of inspiration came from a practical assignment that I had to do for the course Programming Transformation (2006). A part of this assignment was about tracking knowledge about variables that possibly containt null-pointers. These two inspiration-sources lead me to the idea of a program that would track the state of a variable, wheter it was tainted or not, and then warn a user when this was used at the wrong places. This could be used by students to check and improve there programs before they submit.

I wanted to work out this idea, but I had to get a job for the summer to be able to pay my bills. A combination of these two was found in Google's Summer of Code 2006. So I asked the person in charge of the course, Eelco Visser wheter this idea was any good. In a short talk at the elevators I told him my idea and asked him about the Summer of Code. He was interested and there was sure to be someone who could mentor me.

So I started writing on my proposal. I found out that the idea was not really new because Nenad Jovanovic was already developing Pixy. An other project that was related is PHC, the open source PHP compiler. I still wanted to continue with my idea, the reasons for this are all captured in my [[][SoC-application]]

-- EricBouwers - 04 Sep 2006