Getting Started with phpMyAdmin - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 2

PHP, usually installed as a module inside the web server, is a popular scripting
language in which applications are written to communicate with MySQL (or
other database systems) on the back end and browsers on the front end. Ironically,
the acronym's significance has evolved along with the web evolution, from
Personal Home Page to Professional Home Page to its current recursive
deinition— PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor . A blog posting about the successive
name changes is available at http://blog.roshambo.org/how-the-php-acronym-
was-reborn . PHP is available on millions of web domains and powers famous sites
such as Facebook, Yahoo!, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
What is phpMyAdmin?
phpMyAdmin (official home page at http://www.phpmyadmin.net ) is a web
application written in PHP; it contains (like most web applications) XHTML, CSS,
and JavaScript client code. This application provides a complete web interface for
administering MySQL databases, and is widely recognized as the leading application
in this field.
Being open source since its birth, it has enjoyed support from numerous developers
and translators worldwide (being translated into 65 languages at the time of writing
this topic). The project is currently hosted at SourceForge.net and developed using
their facilities by the phpMyAdmin team.
Host providers everywhere are showing their trust in phpMyAdmin by installing
it on their servers. The popular cPanel (a website control application) contains
phpMyAdmin. In addition, we can install our own copy of phpMyAdmin on our
web server as long as our provider's server satisfies with the minimum requirements
(refer to the System requirements section later in this chapter).
The goal of phpMyAdmin is to offer a complete web-based management of
MySQL servers and data, and to keep up with MySQL and web standards evolution.
While the product is always evolving, it supports all standard operations along
with extra features.
The development team constantly fine-tunes the product based on the reported bugs
and requested features, releasing new versions regularly.
phpMyAdmin offers features that cover basic MySQL database and table operations.
It also has an internal system that maintains metadata to support advanced features.
Finally, system administrators can manage users and privileges from phpMyAdmin.
It is important to note that phpMyAdmin's choice of available operations depends on
the rights the user has on a specific MySQL server.