Wednesday 4 March 2015

Why PHP and MySQL Are Vital to Web Development

PHP and MySQL offer the dynamic abilities necessary to run a website in the Web 2.0 era. Sure, there is AJAX and Javascript, but even they use PHP and MySQL for backend processing. Most websites utilize these languages to streamline development, maintenance and make updating tremendously easy.
PHP Before you begin programming a website, you should become familiar with two core ideas:
  1. follow coding standards. Assume you have developed a website for a client. For whatever reason, not necessarily bad, they hire another programmer to to make some changes. The other programmer informs the client it will cost more to make the repairs due to your poor coding. If you didn't have a bad name before, you do now.
  2. document your code for the same reason as #1, but also because if you are hired to go back and make some changes in six months or a year, you will want to know what the purpose of everything was. PHP Documentor makes this tremendously easy.
When I code a website, I do so on my personal computer which acts like a web server. I use AppServ for Windows. You can also use XAMPP for Windows or MAMP for OS X. With PHP, you do not need a program to write the code (though there are many available). Code can be written using any text editor including Notepad. PHP makes communicating across a website easy by sending data via session variables or cookies. This, essentially, is bits and pieces of information that the website needs to function. For example, if you have a contact form you would most likely use PHP to send that form data to either (or both) the MySQL database or via email; either of which are very easy.
With PHP, you can control what type of attachments are submitted with that form. Let's say you operate a social media website and your visitors have the ability to upload images. Yet, you don't want them to be over 100kb and they must be in JPEG or GIF format. PHP makes this easy, also. In addition, you can use PHP anywhere within an HTML document or even a CSS document (provided that PHP is told to do so). This allows you to effectively customize a website around a user's particular preference.
With PHP, the limitations are few - primarily, webmasters and visitors want and expect the transfer of data without interruption; i.e., loading of another page. This is done with AJAX, Flash or Javascript though PHP is still most likely involved. Though new languages are introduced on an annual basis, PHP's wide popularity and usage make it highly unlikely to disappear for many years to come making it an extremely wise choice even for new websites.
PHP Frameworks CakePHP is a free PHP framework developed by a non-profit organization based in Nevada. When needing to customize a website solution, CakePHP is my first choice.
Zend Framework is another free PHP framework sponsored by Zend Technologies. Zend tends to lead the PHP framework field by not only having a larger community, but also developing coding standards as mentioned above.
Though you still must have adequate knowledge of PHP and it's abilities, both frameworks make streamlining applications tremendously easier. There isn't one huge advantage of one over the other. I use CakePHP because it was the first one I got my hands on. I've used Zend, as well and my only complaint was that the class names were much longer to type than those required in CakePHP - hey, I'll take a shortcut when I can get it.:)
MySQL MySQL is a backend database most frequently used in combination with PHP. MySQL is a flat file database meaning which essentially means it operates from files as opposed to a relational database such as Microsoft Office Access. However, this does not limit MySQL's capabilities and, in fact, can be made to act relational by using such methods as hierarchical data trees. MySQL allows the storage of website information without the need of individual files - say a visitor's preferences, for instance. This saves disk space and even makes processing speeds slightly faster.
In addition, learning the query languages is pretty easy:
SELECT 'post_content' FROM 'wp_posts' WHERE 'post_title'='MySQL Tutorial';
Simply put, the above query tells MySQL to return all posts content from my Wordpress table (wp_posts) where the post title is "MySQL Tutorial". Almost English-like, isn't it? Using both MySQL and PHP are vital for the operation of a website. Using them with a framework such as CakePHP and Zend can make life tremendously easy for a developer building a custom solution. The easier it is, the cheaper it is on the client and that should always be your ultimate goal.
PHP and MySQL offer the dynamic abilities necessary to run a website in the Web 2.0 era. Sure, there is AJAX and Javascript, but even they use PHP and MySQL for backend processing. Most websites utilize these languages to streamline development, maintenance and make updating tremendously easy.
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