wilamowski-b-m-irwin-j-d-industrial-communication-systems-2011

62
Development of
Interactive Web Pages
Pradeep Dandamudi
Auburn University
62.1 Introduction..................................................................................... 62-1
62.2 Installations...................................................................................... 62-2
WAMP Server
62.3 Introduction to PHP....................................................................... 62-3
Variables. •. Conditional Statements. •. Loops. •. .
Functions. •. Include Function. •. $_GET and $_POST function
62.4 MySQL.............................................................................................. 62-7
Creating a Database. •. Creating a Table. •. Modifying Tables
62.5 Creating Dynamic Web Sites Using PHP and MySQL........... 62-10
Connecting to Database. •. SQL Queries with PHP. •. Creating
a Database. •. Creating a Table. •. Insert, Update and Delete queries
References.................................................................................................. 62-14
62.1 Introduction
A static Web site, which is generally written in HTML, does not provide the functionality to dynamically
extract the information because static Web sites do not store information in a database, lacking the
functionality needed for dynamic Web sites. In most cases, because static Web pages do not carry large
amount of information, all the information is embedded in the static Web site.
Dynamic Web sites [3] interact dynamically with the client by taking requests from the client, sending
them to the server for processing, and displaying the results on the Web page. Meanwhile, the server
interacts with the database to extract the information required for the user, formats the information
so that the user can read it, and sends it back to the client browser. HTML alone does not provide the
functionality needed for a dynamic, interactive environment. The most common scripting languages
used for developing dynamic Web sites are PHP, Perl, and Python. Figure 62.1 shows the data flow in a
dynamic, interactive client-server environment.
PHP, a server-side scripting language, is the most popular technology that is especially suited for
developing dynamic, interactive Web sites. PHP, which originally stood for “personal home page,” and is
an open-source software initially created to replace a small set of Perl scripts that had been used in Web
sites. Gradually PHP became a general purpose scripting language that is used especially for Web development
and now called “hypertext preprocessor.” PHP is embedded into HTML and interpreted on a
Web server configured to operate PHP scripts. PHP is a server-side scripting language similar to other
server-side scripting languages like Microsoft’s Active Server Pages and Sun Microsystems’ JavaServer
Pages [1]. PHP resembles it a syntax to C and PERL. The main difference between PHP and PERL lays in
the set of standards built in libraries that support the generations of HTML code, processing data from
and to the Web server, and handling cookies [4]. PHP is used in conjunction with database systems, such
62-1
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC