CS310 Official Handouts

Topic: Introduction to PHP

PHP

🞂 PHP is a server scripting language, and a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive Web pages. 🞂 PHP is a widely-used, free, and efficient alternative to competitors such as Microsoft's ASP. 🞂 While PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, it now stands for (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), which is a recursive acronym. 🞂 P -> PHP 🞂 H -> Hypertext 🞂 P -> Preprocessor 🞂 It is powerful enough to be at the core of the biggest blogging system on the web (WordPress)!

🞂 It is also easy enough to be a beginner's first server side language!

Topic: What PHP can do

🞂 PHP can generate dynamic page content 🞂 PHP can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server 🞂 PHP can collect form data 🞂 PHP can send and receive cookies 🞂 PHP can add, delete, modify data in your database 🞂 PHP can be used to control user-access 🞂 PHP can encrypt data 🞂 With PHP, you are not limited to output HTML. 🞂 You can output 🞂 Images 🞂 PDF files 🞂 Flash movies 🞂 XHTML 🞂 XML.

Topic: Why PHP

🞂 PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.) 🞂 PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.) 🞂 PHP supports a wide range of databases like MySQL, MS Access, MS SQL Server, Oracle, etc 🞂 PHP is free. 🞂 PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side 🞂 PHP is FREE 🞂 It runs on Linux which is FREE 🞂 It supports MySQL Free 🞂 It runs on Apache which is also free 🞂 That is why most of the time hosting of PHP is cheap.

Topic: Basic PHP syntax

🞂 A PHP script can be placed anywhere in the document. 🞂 A PHP script starts with <?php and ends with ?>: 🞂 <?php // PHP code goes here

🞂 Extension of PHP page should be .php 🞂 PHP statements end with a semicolon (;)

Topic: Installation and Configuration of WAMP server

To get the PHP running at your computer you will need to

🞂 install a web server 🞂 install PHP 🞂 install a database, such as MySQL

The official PHP website ( ) has installation instructions for

🞂 Installation and configuration process of PHP can be easily done using Bundled Software know as LAMP and WAMP 🞂 LAMP Stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. WAMP is Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP. 🞂 We will be using a WAMP bundle 🞂 This is an open source platform. 🞂 WAMP Server works on Windows Operating System only. 🞂 WAMP is a combine package of Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

VertrigoServ is easy to install package consisting of

🞂 Apache (HTTP web server) 🞂 PHP (Server Side Scripting) 🞂 MySQL (SQL Database Management System) 🞂 PhpMyAdmin (tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL)

Hello World in PHP

<html> <body>

<h1> My first PHP page</h1>

<? php echo " Hello World!";

</body> </html>