Lecture Note Chapter 5 - Apache and PHP

Ch1. The Internet
Ch2. The Internet protocol stack
Ch3. Web Servers
Ch4. HTML
Ch5. Apache and PHP
Ch6. Databases
Ch7. Databases and PHP
Ch8. Business Logic and JavaScript
Ch9. Security
Ch5. Apache and PHP
Previous chap.: simple web server using HTML + how HTTP request/response look like.
Main focus: Real web server in connection with PHP as server-side language.
Questions:
- PHP and what we can do with it
- Our booking page when: PHP + HTML pages created earlier.
3-Tier-Architecture: PHP can create both (1) Business Logic and (2) Frontend.
(In this course, we use XAMPP, a software package containing Apache, MariaDB/MySQL, PHP
and Perl).
I. Personal Home Page (PHP): server-side scripting language for web development
1. Is an interpreter language (different from comiler language)
Interpreter language vs compiler language:
Interpreters and compilers are very similar in structure.
The main difference is that an interpreter directly executes the instructions in the source
programming language while a compiler translates those instructions into efficient machine
code. An interpreter will typically generate an efficient intermediate representation and
immediately evaluate it.
What is a compiler?
The simplest definition of a compiler is a program that translates code written in a high-level
programming language (like JavaScript or Java) into low-level code (like Assembly) directly
executable by the computer or another program such as a virtual machine.
2. PHP file: PHP code is executed on the server, result: returned to the browser
PHP can:
- generate dynamic page content
- create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on server
- collect form data