Scripting The Web

Software Freedom Day 200714th September 2007

Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Nazly Ahmed <me@nazly.net>

Scripting The Web

Agenda

What is PHP?HistoryGetting StartedFeaturesExtensionsFrameworks

What is PHP?

PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor

PHP is a Server-side Scripting Language which can be embedded into HTML

Any PHP tag will be replaced by the Server before its sent back to the client browser

Can be used to collect form data, generate dynamic

page content, send and receive cookies and much more

It’s Open Source – Apache like BSD-style license

Server-side

Server-side

If the PHP file contains

What the end user would get

History of PHPPHP/FI : Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter

Created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995

Perl like syntax

Was able to connect with databases

Enabled users to develop simple Dynamic Web Applications

Code was released for everybody to see

History of PHPPHP/FI 2.0

Released in November 1997

Several people contributing bits of code to this project but still a one-man project.

Several thousand users around the world

50,000 domains reported to have been installed.

History of PHPPHP 3.0Created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite

Solid infrastructure for lots of different databases, protocols and APIs

Contains strong extensibility features

Object oriented syntax support

Powerful and consistent language syntax

It was named plain 'PHP', with the meaning being a recursive acronym - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

Officially released in June 1998

Installed on 10% of the Web Servers on the Internet

History of PHPPHP 4.0Officially released in May 2000.

Rewrite of PHP's core to improve performance of complex applications, and improve the modularity of PHP's code base.

The new engine, named 'Zend Engine'

Support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several new language constructs

Installed on 20% of the Web Servers on the Internet

History of PHPPHP 5.0Officially released in July 2004.

Mainly driven by its core, the Zend Engine 2.0 with a new object model and dozens of other new features

Allows the developers to use the full set of object-oriented features

Installed on 34% of the Web Servers on the Internet

PHP 5.2.4 is the latest stable release.

PHP Usage

PHP: 20,016,421 domains, 1,208,663 IP addresses

Who uses PHP?

Projects Powered by PHP

Getting StartedFor Server-side Scripting

o The PHP parser (CGI or server module)o A Web Server o A Web Browser

Supports all major Operating SystemsLinux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X

Supports most of the Web ServersApache, Microsoft IIS, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many others.

Download the latest stable release of PHP from http://www.php.net/downloads

Online Manual : http://www.php.net/manual/

Features of PHP (5.0)Long list of internal (built-in) functions

Full set of OOP features Allows the developers to use the full set of object-oriented features which lacked in PHP4.

Improved MySQL supportMySQLi, the MySQL Improved extension offers prepared statements, bound parameters and SSL connections. It also takes advantage of PHP5's new object-oriented support to provide an object-oriented interface to MySQL.

Features of PHP (5.0)Easy handling of XML with SimpleXML

The SimpleXML extension provides a very simple and easily usable toolset to convert XML to an object which can be easily processed.

Sessions supportSession support in PHP consists of a way to preserve certain data across subsequent accesses.

Bundled SQLiteSQLite is a small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine

Features of PHP (5.0)Error handling using exceptions

PHP 5 offers a completely different model of error checking than what's available in PHP 4. It's called exception handling. With exceptions you can separate programming logic from error handling and place them in adjoining blocks of code

Streams and FiltersA way of generalizing file, network, data compression, and other operations which share a common set of functions and uses A filter is a final piece of code which may perform operations on data as it is being read from or written to a stream.

php:// http://, https://, ftp://, ftps://compression.gzip://, compression.bz2://php://filter

Reusable PHP ComponentsPEAR : PHP Extension and Application Repository

PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components.

Consists reusable components for Database, Encryption, Images, Web Services, Authentication, Date and Time, Mail and much more.

http://pear.php.net

ExtensionsPECL : PHP Extension Community Library PECL is a repository for PHP Extensions, providing a directory of all known extensions and hosting facilities for downloading and development of PHP extensions.

Consists extension for Database, Encryption, Images, Web Services, Authentication, Date and Time, Mail and much more.

http://pecl.php.net

PHP FrameworksA structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

Compatibility with PHP4 and PHP5

Integrated CRUD for database

Interaction and simplified queries

Application Scaffolding

Model View Controller (MVC) Architecture

Custom URLs

Fast and flexible templating

View Helpers for AJAX, Javascript, HTML Forms and more

http://www.cakephp.org/

PHP FrameworksFew other PHP Frameworks that are available

http://framework.zend.com/

http://www.symfony-project.com/

http://www.codeigniter.com/

Resources

PHP : http://www.php.net

MySQL : http://www.mysql.com

SQLite : http://www.sqlite.org

PEAR : http://pear.php.net

PECL : http://pecl.php.net

Questions?