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: http://www.php.net
 Why Use PHP?
• Simple, yet powerful
scripting tool

• Easily format and

display database
information

• It is popular

Image Source:
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200709/apachemods.html
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: http://www.mysql.com/

 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

http://128.174.242.224/PHPExamples/rainfall.php
 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
Database
 What Else Can PHP Do?
• Command line scripting
• Desktop applications
• Anything
 Links
• PHP.net
• PHP Manual
• MySQL