Server Side Web Development for ECommerce
PHP and MySQL Approach
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Instructor: |
Dale R. "Zai" Fox |
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Office: |
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Office Hours: |
2:00 - 2:50 PM
Monday, Wednesday |
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Phone: |
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E-mail: |
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Text: |
none in print |
| Important References: |
Ullman,
PHP and MySQl for Dynamic Websites, Peachpit Press, 2003. Lerdorf and Tatroe, Programming PHP, O'Reilly, 2002. Lerdorf, PHP Pocket Reference, O'Reilly, 2003. |
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Evaluation: |
The grade will be based on homework, since it is safe to assume the homework is quite involved and people will prevent freeloading.
As usual, homework that is turned in late within 24 hours after the due date will receive an automatic 5 point deduction. Homework that is late more than a day, but received within 3 days will receive an automatic 10 point deduction. Homework that is more than three days late but less than a week late will receive an automatic 15 point deduction. Any homework turned in more than a week late will receive an automatic 25 point deduction. It is usually best to make sure you turn in what is working correctly on time and take the time necessary to get the other parts working before you turn them in. You will get point deductions proportionate to the parts of the homework you turn in late. |
| Background: |
The course is based on the assumption that you have some background in HTML or development of relatively static "information" pages for the web. If you can develop your own personal web in HTML or FrontPage or some similar package you should have more than enough experience. Though you are likely to learn much more about the meaning of HTML tags than you currently know. If you don't currently have these capabilities it should be relatively easy to compensate. We are almost surely going to use Macromedia/Allaire Homesite or DreamWeaver as the basis of our PHP development. Though you can choose another product if you want. Any background in SQL or will be helpful. Almost nothing will be assumed about any such background. |
| Description: |
This course will
present a discussion of the major strategies involved in web development
and their concomitant approaches to ecommerce processing.
Then we will focus on PHP approaches for implementing a functioning
organization website. We will spend little time developing web
page interfaces in class since some background is required.
Then we will start working with MySQL databases and start developing our
template. The primary focus will be on developing HTML for interface development viewed through browsers, PHP as middleware between the client and server and using MySQL for database operations on the server. The template we are building is based off of a relatively high-volume design mimicking some that are used at large corporations. While I won't be implementing the stored procedures that would improve its speed during this semester, such an upgrade shouldn't be very difficult. We will discuss this more in class. |
| Required Software: |
For this course,
most of the processing will be enacted by a web server. Thus
you need to have a web browser, preferably Netscape or Internet Explorer,
in order to interact with the server. The HTML, PHP and MySQL
that we will use will all be executed by the server. You need to register a domain and point the nameservers to ns1.battcave.com This is where we will be hosting the web and the MySQL. We will go over this more in class. Ultimately, the entire course could be developed from Notepad. But you will need some way to upload your files to the web. Some sort of FTP program is best. I use GlobalScape's CuteFTP. It cost about $40. There are many others, for example WS_FTP available at downloads.com, many of which are free. Internet Explorer can also be used to FTP files and how this can be done will be demonstrated in class. Finally, there are a number of development environments that can be used for scripting and page development. I used to think that Macromedia/Allaire's HomeSite was the best. But it seems that their new DreamWeaver MX constains all of the old HomeSite functionality and much more. |
Weekly Topic Coverage
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