Web Databases
PHP and MySQL Server
Approach
|
Instructor: |
Dale R. "Zai" Fox, Ph.D. |
|
Office: |
|
|
Office Hours: |
2:00 - 2:50 PM
Monday, Wednesday |
|
Phone: |
|
|
E-mail: |
|
|
Text: |
Larry Ullman, PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites, Peachpit Press, 2003. |
| Important Reference: | Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Pocket Reference, O'Reilly, 2003. |
|
Evaluation: |
The grade will be based on homework and tests
|
| Background: |
The course will be based on the assumption that you have some background in HTML or development of relatively static "information" pages for the WWW. 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. Any background in MySQL or SQL will be helpful. Almost nothing will be assumed about any such background. |
| Description: |
This course will be more of a course in PHP and MySQL with a focus on what it takes to develop some sort of store shopper profile pages
and the administrative capabilities to deal with them. Developing
these administrative capabilities is actually more involved than
developing the shopper profile capabilities, but something hidden from
the shopper's experience. Think about sites where you are a repeat shopper. It is very nice to be able to visit and have them pull up things like your shipping and billing information without you having to reenter it. You probably have not thought about the more administrative side of such situations. We will also develop a web-based administrative interface. The template will be more like a site that registers users based on their interests. On a site like this you could develop other aspects such as user reports, chats, surveys and bulletin boards. |
| Required Software: |
For this course,
most of the processing will be enacted by a web server. Thus
you need to have a web browser in order to interact with the server. The HTML will be executed by a
client's browser. The PHP and MySQL will be
executed on the server. I'm expecting each of you to register a domain and point the nameservers to ns1.battcave.com Personally, I think battcave.com does a very good job in a lot of ways and their approaches to a lot of things will be something we will examine throughout the course. Ultimately, the entire course could be developed from Notepad. I used to use Homesite since I have been using it for web scripting for years. But Homesite costs money. Dreamweaver MX seems to now integrate all of the old HomeSite functionality into something much more, so it seems to be an even better choice. 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. You can also use Internet Explorer as an FTP program, which we will quickly cover in class. |
Weekly Topic Coverage
Return to Dale R. "Zy" Fox's Courses Page
Return to Dale R. "Zy" Fox's Home Page