PHP, MySQL, & JavaScript All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 2

Using a Web Server

IN THIS CHAPTER

Exploring your development options

Picking a development environment

Configuring the servers

Before you can start developing dynamic web applications, you’ll need a web server environment to work in. You have lots of different choices available to create your own development environment, but sometimes having more options just makes things more confusing. This chapter walks through the different options you have for creating your development environment.

Recognizing What’s Required

Just like that famous furniture that needs assembly, you’ll need to assemble some separate components to get your web application development environment up and running. There are three main parts that you need to assemble for your web development environment:

• A web server to process requests from browsers to interact with your application
• A PHP server to run the PHP server-side programming code in your application
• A database server to store the data required for your dynamic application

On the surface, this may seem fairly simple, but to make things more complicated, each of these parts has different options and versions available. That can lead to literally ...