Pro PHP and jQuery by Jason Lengstorf.pdf - Computer Science ...

C H A P T E R 4
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Build an Events Calendar
Now that you’re up to speed on the concept of object-oriented programming, you can start working on
the project that will be the meat and potatoes of this book: the events calendar. It all starts here, and as
this book progresses, you’ll be adding more and more functionality using both PHP and jQuery.
Planning the Calendar
Because you’re starting from absolute scratch, you need to take a minute to plan the application. This
application will be database-driven (using MySQL), so the planning will take part in two stages: first the
database structure and then a basic map of the application that will access and modify the database.
Defining the Database Structure
To make building the application much easier, the first thing you should plan is how the data will be
stored. This shapes everything in the application.
For a basic events calendar, all the information you’ll need to store is the following:
• event_id: An automatically incremented integer that uniquely identifies each
event
• event_title: The title of the event
• event_desc: A full description of the event
• event_start: The start time of the event (in format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS)
• event_end: The end time of the event (in format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS)
Creating the Class Map
The next step is to lay out the main class that will handle all the actions our application will perform
related to the calendar events. This class will be called Calendar; the methods and properties will be laid
out like so:
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