PHP and MySQL® For Dummies®, 4th Edition

Chapter 3. Developing a Web Database Application

In This Chapter

• Planning your application

• Selecting and organizing your data

• Designing your database

• Building your database: An overview

• Writing your application programs: An overview

Developing a Web database application involves more than just storing data in MySQL databases and typing in PHP programs. Development has to start with planning. Building the application pieces comes after planning. The development steps are

1. Develop a plan, listing the tasks that your application will perform.

2. Design the database needed to support your application tasks.

3. Build the MySQL database, based on the database design.

4. Write the PHP programs that perform the application tasks.

I discuss these steps in detail in this chapter.

Planning Your Web Database Application

Before you ever put finger to keyboard to write a PHP program, you need to plan your Web database application. This is possibly the most important step in developing your application. It's painful to discover, especially just after you finish the last program for your application, that you left something out and have to start over from the beginning. It's also hard on your computer (and your foot) when you take out your frustrations by drop-kicking it across the room.

Tip

Good planning prevents such painful backtracking. In addition, it keeps you focused on the functionality of your application, thus preventing you from writing pieces for the application that do really cool things but turn out to have ...