Introducing phpMyAdmin - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management - page 2

PHP and MySQL: The Leading
Open-Source Duo
This chapter describes the place of phpMyAdmin in the context of PHP/MySQL,
explains phpMyAdmin's history, and summarizes its features. Let us look at
the solutions currently offered by host providers. The most prevalent is the
PHP/MySQL combination.
Well-supported by their respective home sites, http://www.php.net and
http://www.mysql.com , this duo has enabled developers to offer a lot of
ready-made open-source web applications, and most importantly, enabled in-house
developers to quickly put in place solid web solutions.
MySQL, which is mostly compliant with the SQL:2003 standard, is a database system
well known for its speed, robustness, and small connection overhead, which is
important in a web context where pages must be served as quickly as possible.
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 signification has evolved itself along with the Web evolution, from
Personal Home Page to Professional Home Page to its current recursive definition:
PHP: Hypertext Processor . A reference about the successive name changes can
be seen in PHP's source code itself at http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/php3/
CHANGES?r1=1.23&r2=1.24 . Available on millions of Web domains, PHP drives its
own wave of quickly developed applications.
What is phpMyAdmin?
phpMyAdmin is a web application written in PHP and contains—like most web
applications—XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript client code. It provides a complete web
interface to administering MySQL databases and is widely recognized as the leading
application in this field.
Being open source since the start of its existence, it has enjoyed support from
numerous developers and translators world wide (being translated into 54 languages
at the time of going to press). The project is currently hosted on SourceForge.