4Part IPHP: The BasicsStrictly speaking, PHP has little (Shared web hosting)
4Part IPHP: The BasicsStrictly speaking, PHP has little to do with layout, events, on the fly DOM manipulation, orreally anything about what a Web page looks and sounds like. In fact, most of what PHP doesis invisible to the end user. Someone looking at a PHP page will not necessarily be able to tellthat it was not written purely in HTML, because usually the result of PHP isHTML. PHP is an official module of Apache HTTP Server, the market-leading free Web server thatruns about 67 percent of the World Wide Web (according to the widely quoted Netcraft Webserver survey). This means that the PHP scripting engine can be built into the Web serveritself, leading to faster processing, more efficient memory allocation, and greatly simplifiedmaintenance. Like Apache Server, PHP is fully cross-platform, meaning it runs native on sev- eral flavors of Unix, as well as on Windows and now on Mac OS X. All projects under the aegisof the Apache Software Foundation including PHP are open source software. What Is MySQL? MySQL (pronounced My Ess Q El) is an open source, SQL Relational Database ManagementSystem (RDBMS) that is free for many uses (more detail on that later). Early in its history, MySQL occasionally faced opposition due to its lack of support for some core SQL constructssuch as subselects and foreign keys. Ultimately, however, MySQL found a broad, enthusiasticuser base for its liberal licensing terms, perky performance, and ease of use. Its acceptancewas aided in part by the wide variety of other technologies such as PHP, Java, Perl, Python, and the like that have encouraged its use through stable, well-documented modules andextensions. MySQL has not failed to reward the loyalty of these users with the addition ofboth subselects and foreign keys as of the 4.1 series. Databases in general are useful, arguably the most consistently useful family of softwareproducts the killer product of modern computing. Like many competing products, bothfree and commercial, MySQL isn t a database until you give it some structure and form. Youmight think of this as the difference between a database and an RDBMS (that is, RDBMS plususer requirements equals a database). There s lots more to say about MySQL, but then again, there s lots more space in which to say it. The History of PHPRasmus Lerdorf software engineer, Apache team member, and international man ofmystery is the creator and original driving force behind PHP. The first part of PHP was devel- oped for his personal use in late 1994. This was a CGI wrapper that helped him keep track ofpeople who looked at his personal site. The next year, he put together a package called thePersonal Home Page Tools(a.k.a. the PHP Construction Kit) in response to demand from userswho had stumbled into his work by chance or word of mouth. Version 2 was soon releasedunder the title PHP/FI and included the Form Interpreter, a tool for parsing SQL queries. By the middle of 1997, PHP was being used on approximately 50,000 sites worldwide. It wasclearly becoming too big for any single person to handle, even someone as focused and ener- getic as Rasmus. A small core development team now runs the project on the open source benevolent junta model, with contributions from developers and users around the world. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, the two Israeli programmers who developed the PHP3 andPHP4 parsers, have also generalized and extended their work under the rubric of Zend.com(Zeev, Andi, Zend, get it?).
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