Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 13
Web Database Applications
MySQL's most common use is in wePHPMyb database applications. It's often teamed
with PHP—a web-enabled scripting language—and the Apache web server to develop
powerful applications including online shopping, news, sports, and blogs. Indeed, the
Apache web server, MySQL, and PHP together form three of the four components of
the most popular of all web development platforms, LAMP. The “L” stands for Linux,
but the material we cover here works with all three operating systems we look at in this
book: Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
The LAMP acronym is increasingly interpreted rather loosely as representing any open
source development platform for web database applications. The “P” is alternatively
taken to stand for Perl, which we introduce in Chapter 16; Python; or another of the
popular web programming languages. Similarly, MySQL can be replaced by another
open source database system, PostgreSQL (
http://www.postgresql.org
)
. PostgreSQL is
less popular than MySQL, but it has strong standards compliance, is rich in features,
and has looser licensing conditions, making it more appropriate for some applications.
We introduce the following concepts in this chapter:
• Components of a web database application
• An overview of the Apache web server
• An overview of the PHP language, including short examples
The final section of this chapter lists resources where you can find out more about
Apache and PHP. We'll look at several PHP examples but will leave detailed explana-
tion of using PHP and MySQL to Chapter 14, and will build a complete application
with these in Chapter 15.
Building a Web Database Application
This section gives an overview of web database applications, drawing analogies and
contrasts to the conventional software that you use on your computer. As an overview,
it doesn't discuss technical details in depth; we get to the details later. “How Web
