Chapter 1. Database Applications and the Web
Most of the services we enjoy on the Web are provided by web database
applications. Web-based email, online shopping, forums and bulletin
boards, corporate web sites, and sports and news portals are all
database-driven. To build a modern web site, you need to develop a
database application.
This book presents a highly popular, easy, low-cost way to bring
together the Web and
databases to build applications.
The most popular database management system used in these solutions
is MySQL, a very fast and easy-to-use system distributed under an
Open Source license by its manufacturer, MySQL AB. We discuss MySQL
in detail in this book.
With a web server such as Apache (we assume Apache in this book,
although the software discussed here works with other web servers as
well) and MySQL, you have most of what you need to develop a web
database application. The key glue you need is a way for the web
server to talk to the database; in other words, a way to incorporate
database operations into web pages. The most popular glue that
accomplishes this task is PHP.
PHP is an open source project of the Apache Software Foundation and
it's the most popular Apache web server add-on
module, with around 53% of the Apache HTTP servers having PHP
capabilities. PHP is particularly suited to
web database applications because of its integration tools for the
Web and database environments. In particular, the flexibility of
embedding scripts in HTML pages permits easy integration of HTML
presentation and code. The database tier integration support is also
excellent, with more than 15 libraries available to interact with
almost all popular database servers. In this book, we present a
comprehensive view of PHP along with a number of powerful extensions
provided by a repository known as PEAR.
Apache, MySQL, and PHP can run on a wide variety of operating
systems. In this book, we show you how to use them on Linux, Mac OS
X, and Microsoft Windows.
This is an introductory book, but it gives you the sophisticated
knowledge you need to build applications properly. This includes
critical tasks such as checking user input, handling errors robustly,
and locking your database operations to avoid data corruption. Most
importantly, we explain the principles behind good web database
applications. You'll finish the book with not only
the technical skills to create an application, but also an
appreciation for the strategies that make an application secure,
reliable, maintainable, and expandable.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment