As a web programming language, one of PHP’s strengths traditionally has been to make it easy to write scripts that access databases so that you can create dynamic web pages that incorporate database content. This is important when you want to provide visitors with information that is always up-to-date, without hand tweaking a lot of static HTML pages. However, although PHP is easy to use, it includes no general-purpose database access interface. Instead it has a number of specialized ones that take the form of separate sets of functions for each database system. There is one set for MySQL, another for InterBase, and another for PostgreSQL—and others as well.
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eXtc Web Developer (EWD) is a very high productivity, enterprise-grade platform for developing web applications. It includes an advanced but extremely easy to use Ajax Framework, allowing sophisticated, modern web applications to be built almost as quickly and simply as static web pages. EWD has been designed to be technology-independent, and is potentially capable of working with any web application front-end environment (eg PHP, Java Server Pages, ASP.Net), any scripting language and any database.
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RealObjects PDFreactor is a powerful formatting processor that enables server-side PDF creation from XML and XHTML/HTML documents using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define page layout and styles. You can dynamically generate PDF documents such as reports, invoices, statements and others on-the-fly. Since PDFreactor runs on your server, the end-user does not need any software other than a Web browser with a free PDF viewer.
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A number of new geospatial viewing tools from major players in the Internet industry have recently appeared on the scene and are taking the geospatial world by storm. Google,Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all released web-based mapping tools in the recent past, and collectively these new players to the industry have raised the bar for Internet mapping. Although their functional capabilities don’t provide anything we haven’t seen in web offerings from traditional GIS vendors, their emergence has been significant in that they have managed to capture a wider audience. Google, in particular, has emerged as the leader of this pack with it’s recently released Google Maps product which provides a slick, highly responsive visual interface built using AJAX technologies along with detailed street and aerial imagery data, and an open API allowing customization of the map output including the ability to add application specific data to the map.
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Facebook Open Platform (fbOpen) is a snapshot of the infrastructure that runs Facebook Platform. It includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. We’ve included samples and some dummy data to help you get started fast. Facebook Open Platform also has extensibility points built in so you can add your own functionality, such as your own FBML tags, API methods, and so forth.
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Many developers have learned to use PHP over the years because it’s a good solution for creat- ing Web pages and the price is right. The PHP acronym is like many other new acronyms for the Internet—the acronym is recursive (refers back to itself). PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Processor. This general-purpose HTML scripting language works much like ASP (see Chapter 6) or other page description languages you might have used. Essentially, you mix HTML with scripting information. When the PHP process sees HTML, it sends the text directly to the user. It processes any scripting information, and passes the resulting HTML to the user as well.
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Writing PHP code is quite a fun task – as we’re sure of you will agree – it’s an easily learnt, flexible, and feature-rich language that lends itself very well to scripts of all shapes and sizes. Almost certainly as a result of this comparative ease of use, many PHP programmers take to re-inventing the wheel a lot and spend much time writing and rewriting ‘new and improved’ code to handle authentication, caching, forums, opinion polls, and other systems that have been coded and recoded in the past.
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In the Getting Started with MX Breadcrumbs tutorial, you will learn how to use MX Breadcrumbs for quickly inserting breadcrumbs in your site pages. Beginning with the files in your installation package, you will understand what MX Breadcrumbs is, how it works, and what you can do with it. Although much of the tutorial and sample site were done in PHP, the ColdFusion and ASP steps are nearly identical. The primary difference is in the database configuration and connection sections, where separate instructions are provided.
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