Twitter® Application Development for Dummies®

Chapter 2. Web Development Refresher Course

In This Chapter

• The basics of Web development

• A look at the LAMP stack

• Reference material for the Web developer

An interesting thing about Twitter application development is you can interact with the API in any language and on any platform. Windows clients, iPhone applications, and Android apps use different programming languages and still interact with the Twitter API in similar ways.

In this book, I use a typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack to demonstrate the Twitter API. I use the Web platform as a teaching tool because it has become prevalent, multiplatform, and Twitter itself is a Web app. I use a LAMP stack because it is a widely adopted development platform and all the components are open source and free.

Tip

If you're already an expert LAMP user, you can skip to Chapter 3.

If Web programming isn't your native language, read this chapter. However, this isn't a definitive LAMP resource. The topics in this chapter could easily fill several books on their own. My aim here is to show you enough to get you through the rest of the book.

Writing HTML & CSS

If you've done Web development work before, you're probably familiar with HTML and CSS. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language of the Web. Web browsers interpret the semantics of the HTML elements, called tags, and render a human readable page for the visitor. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the markup language that tells the browser how the HTML elements are to be styled ...