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 ...
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