Monday 6 February 2012

PHP and MySQL

PHP today is the most widely used back-end programming language used on the Web. PHP is an open source language, which effectively means it is free to use, it's very well supported with tons of books and online resources and it is the choice language of literally tens of thousands of Web developers.

When would a Web Developer use PHP?

Initially websites were developed solely in HTML. What this means is that all the content for the website resides on the HTML pages. So for example if your company had a 1000 products you would create a separate HTML Web page for each product.

The major problem with this scenario is that the design and the content reside in the same place so, for example, if you wanted to update all the product prices you would need to edit and update all 1000 Web pages. Not only was this very time consuming but allowing non-Web designers access to the HTML could potentially have very serious consequences if the HTML code was compromised in any way.

The solution was to create a database driven website where all the content resides in an external database. You would then only need to create one product page and depending which parameter was passed to the database - the website would display only the relevant product/s. Obviously this creates a much more controlled environment and a simple task like change product prices could be achieved in seconds.

As HTML is a static language, it can't talk directly with the database and therefore Web developers use a programming language such as PHP to feed information to and from the Database. Other benefits of using databases include accumulating information from your users via HTML form submission, login authentication, e-commerce, managing large volumes of data and more.

MySQL is an open source database which is commonly used by PHP developers. PHP and MySQL are a powerful team of tools for any Web Developer.

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