Expanding Your Knowledge of PHP

PHP is a full-featured scripting language for creating web applications and even writing command-line scripts. What you've seen in this lesson is just a brief introduction to the language. There are more statements, lots more built-in functions, and plenty of other things about the application for which there isn't space to discuss in this lesson. Fortunately, an online version of the PHP manual is available that will fill in most of the blanks for you. You can find it at http://www.php.net/docs.php.

Also, shelves of books about PHP are available to you. Some that you might want to look into are Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours, 3rd Edition (ISBN 0672326191), Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes (ISBN 0672327627). You might also look at PHP and MySQL Web Development, 3rd Edition (ISBN 0672326728).

There's more to PHP than just the core language, too. Lots of libraries have been written by users to take care of common programming tasks that you might run into. There's an online repository for these libraries called PEAR, which stands for PHP Extension and Application Repository. You can find it at http://pear.php.net/.

For example, the eBay website provides an API (application programming interface) that you can use to integrate your own website with eBay. You could write the code to use this API yourself, but a library in PEAR already exists. You can find it at http://pear.php.net/package/Services_Ebay.

This is just one of the many libraries you can obtain via PEAR. When you're writing your applications, make sure to check the PHP manual to ensure there's not already a built-in function to take care of whatever you're doing. If there isn't, you should check PEAR.

As I said before, I left out huge swaths of PHP functionality in this lesson for the sake of space. Here are some areas that you'll want to look into before developing your own PHP applications.

Database Connectivity

I mentioned CRUD applications already. A CRUD application is generally just a front end for a relational database, which in turn is an application optimized for storing data within tables. Databases can be used to store content for websites, billing information for an online store, payroll for a company, or anything else that can be expressed as a table. It seems like there's a relational database providing the storage for just about every popular website.

Because databases play such a huge role in developing web applications, PHP provides a lot of database-related functionality. Most relational databases are applications that can be accessed over a network, a lot like a web server. PHP is capable of connecting to every popular relational database. In order to communicate with relational databases, you have to use a language called SQLthe structured query language. That's another book unto itself.

Regular Expressions

Regular expressions comprise a small language designed to provide programmers with a flexible way to match patterns in strings. For example, the regular expression ^a.*z$ matches a string that starts with a, ends with z, and has some number of characters in between. You can use regular expressions to do much more fine-grained form validation than I did in Exercise 20.1. They're also used to extract information from files, search and replace within strings, parse email addresses, or anything else that requires you to solve a problem with pattern matching. Regular expressions are incredibly flexible, but the syntax can be a bit complex.

PHP actually supports two different varieties of regular expression syntaxPerl style and POSIX style. You can read about both of them in the PHP manual.

Sending Mail

PHP provides functions for sending email. For example, you could write a PHP script that automatically notifies an administrator by email when a user registers for a website, or sends users a password reminder if they request one when they forget their password. PHP also provides functions that enable your applications to retrieve mail as well as send it, making it possible to write web-based email clients and other such applications.

Object-Oriented PHP

PHP provides features for object-oriented development if you prefer that style of programming. The object-oriented features work differently between PHP 4, which is the version that's most commonly deployed, and PHP 5, the most recent version of the language. For more information on object-oriented PHP, refer to the manual.

Cookies and Sessions

Cookies are a browser feature that lets websites set values that are stored by your browser and returned to the server any time you request a page. For example, when users log into your site, you can set a cookie on their computers to keep track of who they are so that you don't have to force them to log in any time they want to see a passwordprotected page. You can also use cookies to keep track of when visitors return to your site after their initial visit. PHP provides full support for cookies. It also provides a facility called sessions. Sessions enable you to store data between requests to the server. For example, you could read a user's profile into his or her session when that user logs into the site, and then reference it on every page without going back and loading it all over again. Generally cookies are used with sessions so that the server can keep track of which session is associated with a particular user.

File Uploads

Back in Lesson 10, you learned about file upload fields for forms. PHP can deal with file uploads, enabling the programmer to access and manipulate them. With PHP, file uploads are stored to a temporary location on the server, and it's up to the programmer to decide whether to store them permanently and, if so, where to put them.