PHP and MySQL® For Dummies®, 4th Edition

Chapter 10. Putting It All Together

In This Chapter

• Organizing your whole application

• Organizing individual programs

• Making your application secure

• Documenting your application

The previous chapters provide you with the tools you need to build your Web database application. In Part I, you find out how PHP and MySQL work and how to get access to them. In addition, you discover what you need to do to build your application and in what order. In Part II, you find out how to build and use a MySQL database. In Part III, you discover what features PHP has and how to use them. In addition, Part III explains how to show information in a Web page, collect information from users, and store information in a database. Now here, in the first chapter in Part IV, you're ready to put all the pieces together into a complete application. To do this, you need to

• Organize the application.

• Make sure that the application is secure.

• Document the application.

I describe each of these steps in detail.

Organizing the Application

Organizing the application is for your benefit. As far as PHP is concerned, the application could be 8 million PHP statements all on one line of one computer file. PHP doesn't care about lines, indents, or files. However, humans write and maintain the programs for the application, and humans need organization. Applications require two levels of organization:

• The application level: Most applications need more than one program to deliver complete functionality. You must divide the functions of ...