Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

PEAR can be a major catalyst for quickly creating PHP applications. Hopefully this chapter convinced you of the serious time savings this repository can present. You learned about the PEAR Package Manager, and how to manage and use packages.

Forthcoming chapters introduce additional packages, as appropriate, showing you how these packages can really speed development and enhance your application’s capabilities.

This chapter covered quite a bit of material, beginning with an overview of several date and time functions that appear almost daily in typical PHP programming tasks. Next up was a journey into the ancient art of Date Fu, where you learned how to combine the capabilities of these functions to carry out useful chronological tasks. We also covered the useful Calendar PEAR package, where you learned how to create grid-based calendars, and both validation and navigation mechanisms. Finally, for those readers living on the frayed edges of emerging technology, an introduction to PHP 5.1’s new date-manipulation features was provided.

The next chapter is focused on the topic that is likely responsible for piquing your interest in learning more about PHP: user interactivity. We’ll jump into data processing via forms, demonstrating both basic features and advanced topics such as how to work with multivalued form components and automated form generation. You’ll also learn how to facilitate user navigation by creating breadcrumb navigation trails and custom 404 messages.

One of the Web’s great strengths is the ease with which it enables us to not only disseminate but also compile and aggregate user information. However, as developers, this mean that we must spend an enormous amount of time building and maintaining a multitude of user interfaces, many of which are complex HTML forms. The concepts described in this chapter should enable you to decrease that time a tad.

In addition, this chapter offered a few commonplace strategies for improving the general user experience while working with your application. Although not an exhaustive list, perhaps the material presented in this chapter will act as a springboard for you to conduct further experimentation, as well as help you to decrease the time that you invest in what is surely one of the more time-consuming aspects of Web development: improving the user experience.

The next chapter shows you how to protect the sensitive areas of your Web site by forcing users to supply a username and password prior to entry.

From internal project to global competitor, MySQL has indeed come a very long way in just a few short years. This chapter offered a brief overview of this climb to stardom, detailing MySQL’s history, progress, and future. A few of the thousands of successful user stories were also presented, highlighting the use of MySQL at craigslist.org, Yahoo! Finance, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

In the following chapters, you’ll become further acquainted with many MySQL basic topics, including the installation and configuration process, the many MySQL clients, table structures, and MySQL’s security features. If you’re new to MySQL, this material will prove invaluable for getting up to speed regarding the basic features and behavior of this powerful database server. If you’re already quite familiar with MySQL, consider browsing the material nonetheless; at the very least, it should serve as a valuable reference.

Transferring files via the Web eliminates a great many inconveniences otherwise posed by firewalls and FTP servers and clients. It also enhances an application’s ability to easily manipulate and publish nontraditional files. In this chapter, you learned just how easy it is to add such capabilities to your PHP applications. In addition to offering a comprehensive overview of PHP’s file-upload features, several practical examples were discussed.

The next chapter introduces in great detail the highly useful Web development topic of tracking users via session handling.

PHP’s networking capabilities won’t soon replace those tools already offered on the command line or other well-established clients. Nonetheless, as PHP’s command-line capabilities continue to gain traction, it’s likely you’ll quickly find a use for some of the material presented in this chapter.

The next chapter introduces one of the most powerful examples of how PHP can effectively interact with other enterprise technologies, showing you just how easy it is to interact with your preferred directory server using PHP’s LDAP extension.

The ability to interact with powerful third-party technologies such as LDAP through PHP is one of the main reasons programmers love working with the language. PHP’s LDAP support makes it so easy to create Web-based applications that work in conjunction with directory servers, and has the potential to offer a number of great value-added benefits to your user community.

The next chapter introduces what is perhaps one of PHP’s most compelling features: session handling. You’ll learn how to play “Big Brother,” tracking users’ preferences, actions, and thoughts as they navigate through your application. Okay, maybe not their thoughts, but maybe we can request that feature for a forthcoming version.

This chapter covered the gamut of PHP’s session-handling capabilities. You learned about many of the configuration directives used to define this behavior, in addition to the most commonly used functions that are used to incorporate this functionality into your applications. The chapter concluded with a real-world example of PHP’s user-defined session handlers, showing you how to turn a MySQL table into the session-storage media.

The next chapter addresses another advanced but highly useful topic: templating. Separating logic from presentation is a topic of constant discussion, as it should be; intermingling the two practically guarantees you a lifetime of application maintenance anguish. Yet actually achieving such separation seems to be a rare feat when it comes to Web applications. It doesn’t have to be this way!

Smarty is a powerful solution to a nagging problem that developers face on a regular basis. Even if you don’t choose it as your templating engine, hopefully the concepts set forth in this chapter at least convinced you that some templating solution is necessary.

In the next chapter, the fun continues, as we turn our attention to PHP’s abilities as applied to one of the newer forces to hit the IT industry in recent years: Web Services. You’ll learn about several interesting Web Services features, some built into PHP and others made available via third-party extensions.

The promise of Web Services and other XML-based technologies has generated an incredible amount of work in this area, with progress regarding specifications, and the announcement of new products and projects happening all of the time. No doubt such efforts will continue, given the incredible potential that this concentration of technologies has to offer.

In the next chapter, you’ll turn your attention to the security-minded strategies that developers should always keep at the forefront of their development processes.