Fedora web server - PHP SOLUTIONS: DYNAMIC WEB DESIGN MADE EASY I
PHP SOLUTIONS: DYNAMIC WEB DESIGN MADE EASY I have found the following file comparison utilities to be reliable: Windows Beyond Compare (www.scootersoftware.com): An excellent tool. Try it free for 30 days. Thereafter it requires an individual license ($30 at the time of this writing). WinMerge (http://winmerge.sourceforge.net): A good open source tool. Free. Mac OS X TextWrangler and BBEdit (both from www.barebones.com) contain good file comparison utilities. TextWrangler is a free, cut-down version of BBEdit. Deciding where to test your pages Unlike ordinary web pages, you can t just double-click PHP pages in Windows Explorer or Finder on a Mac and view them in your browser. They need to be parsed processed through a web server that supports PHP. If your hosting company supports PHP, you can just upload your files to your website and test them there. However, you need to upload the file every time you make a change. In the early days, you ll probably find you have to do this often because of some minor mistake in your code. As you become more experienced, you ll still need to upload files frequently because you ll want to experiment with different ideas. If you want to get working with PHP straight away, by all means use your remote server as a test bed. However, I m sure you ll soon discover the need to set up a local PHP test environment. The rest of this chapter is devoted to showing you how to do it, with separate instructions for Windows and Mac OS X. What you need for a local test environment To test PHP pages on your local computer, you need to install the following: A web server (Apache or IIS) PHP To work with a database, you ll also need MySQL. However, you can do a great deal with PHP even without a database, so I plan to leave the installation of MySQL until Chapter 10. All the software you need is free. The only cost to you is the time it takes to download the necessary files, plus, of course, the time to make sure everything is set up correctly. You could be up and running in little more than an hour. However, I urge you not to rush things. Although the installation process isn t difficult, you do need to get it right. If you already have a web server and PHP on your local computer, there s no need to reinstall. Just check the section at the end of the chapter titled Checking your PHP set- tings (Windows and Mac).
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