MySQL APIs Used in This Book
MySQL programming interfaces exist for
many languages, including (in alphabetical order)
C, C++, Eiffel, Java, Pascal, Perl, PHP,
Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and Tcl. Given this fact, writing a MySQL cookbook presents an
author with something of a challenge. Clearly the book should provide
recipes for doing many interesting and useful things with MySQL, but
which API or APIs should the book use? Showing an implementation of
every recipe in every language would result either in covering very
few recipes or in a very, very large book! It would also result in a
lot of redundancy when implementations in different languages bear a
strong resemblance to each other. On the other hand,
it's worthwhile taking advantage of multiple
languages, because one language often will be more suitable than
another for solving a particular type of problem.
To resolve this dilemma, I've picked a small number
of APIs from among those that are available and used them to write
the recipes in this book. This limits its scope to a manageable
number of APIs while allowing some latitude to choose from among
them. The primary APIs covered here are:
- Perl
Using the DBI module and its MySQL-specific driver
- PHP
Using its set of built-in MySQL support functions
- Python
Using the DB-API module and its MySQL-specific driver
- Java
Using a MySQL-specific driver for the Java Database Connectivity
(JDBC) interface
Why these languages? Perl and
PHP were easy to pick.
Perl is arguably the most widely used
language on the Web, and it became so based on certain strengths such
as its text-processing capabilities. In particular,
it's very popular for writing MySQL programs.
PHP also is widely deployed, and its use
is increasing steadily. One of PHP's strengths is
the ease with which you can use it to access databases, making it a
natural choice for MySQL scripting.
Python and
Java are not as popular as Perl or PHP for
MySQL programming, but each has significant numbers of followers. In
the Java community in particular, MySQL seems to be making strong
inroads among developers who use JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology to
build database-backed web applications. (An anecdotal observation:
After I wrote MySQL (New Riders), Python and
Java were the two languages not covered in that book that readers
most often said they would have liked to have seen addressed. So here
they are!)
I believe these languages taken together reflect pretty well the
majority of the existing user base of MySQL programmers. If you
prefer some language not shown here, you can still use this book, but
be sure to pay careful attention to Chapter 2, to
familiarize yourself with the book's primary API
languages. Knowing how database operations are performed with the
APIs used here will help you understand the recipes in later chapters
so that you can translate them into languages not discussed.
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