Intro to PHP Carl-Erik Svensson

What is PHP? PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML* *Source:

Why Use PHP? Simple, yet powerful scripting tool Easily format and display database information It is popular Image Source:

The Basics

The Results Output from a script goes directly into the HTML that is parsed This is what is meant by a ‘dynamic’ webpage

Some Syntax Generally C-like Variables are not strongly typed

Web Applications Form processing Database manipulation –Blogs –Forums –Facebook

PHP + MySQL = Sweet MySQL is an open source database software solution Enables rich web applications when combined with PHP Image Source:

Rainfall Application Read the contents of a database Get the rainfall data Parse the results Display it

Connecting to a Database PHP Has a set of functions that can be used with MySQL First step is to setup a link to the desired database

Making a Query Once a link is established, querying is easy Errors for any given function are returned by mysql_error()

MySQL Result Set The value returned by mysql_query() is a reference to an internal data structure It can be parsed by various functions

Associative Arrays An array that can be indexed by a string A set of key->value pairs Very similar to a hash in Perl

PHP foreach Similar to the Perl equivalent Allows iterating through each element of an array

Put it All Together

The Results

A Slight Improvement This was not the exact code we came up with I added some titles and a neat trick –Highlight every other row in the table –This makes information more readable

Samples USGS Example Rainfall EC Awards Committee Scholarship DatabaseEC Awards Committee Scholarship Database

What Else Can PHP Do? Command line scripting Desktop applications Anything

Links PHP.net PHP Manual MySQL w3schools.com