Introduction

So you need to develop an interactive Web site. Perhaps your boss just put you in charge of the company’s online product catalog. Or you want to develop your own Web business. Or your sister wants to sell her paintings online. Or you volunteered to put up a Web site open only to members of your circus acrobats’ association. Whatever your motivation might be, you can see that the application needs to store information (such as information about products or member passwords), thus requiring a database. You can see also that the application needs to interact dynamically with the user; for instance, the user selects a product to view or enters membership information. This type of Web site is a Web database application. I assume that you’ve created static Web pages before, using HTML (HyperText Markup Language), but creating an interactive Web site is a new challenge, as is designing a database. You asked three computer gurus you know what you should do. They said a lot of things you didn’t understand, but among the technical jargon, you heard “quick” and “easy” and “free” mentioned in the same sentence as PHP and MySQL. Now you want to know more about using PHP and MySQL to develop the Web site that you need. PHP and MySQL work together very well; it’s a dynamic partnership. In this chapter, you find out the advantages of each, how each one works, and how they work together to produce a dynamic Web database application.