Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL: Pt. 4

This is it — the stuff you signed up for! In this chapter,
you’ll learn how to take information stored in a database and
display it on a Web page for all to see. So far you have
installed and learned the basics of MySQL, a relational database
engine, and PHP, a server-side scripting language. Now you’ll see
how to use these two new tools together to create a true
database-driven Web site!

A Look Back at First Principles

Before we leap forward, it’s worth a brief look back to remind
ourselves of the goal we’re working toward. We have two powerful,
new tools at our disposal: the PHP scripting language, and the
MySQL database engine. It’s important to understand how these two
will fit together.

The whole idea of a database-driven Web site is to allow the
content of the site to reside in a database, and for that content
to be dynamically pulled from the database to create Web pages
for people to view with a regular Web browser. So on one end of
the system you have a visitor to your site who uses a Web browser
to load http://www.yoursite.com/, and expects to
view a standard HTML Web page. On the other end you have the
content of your site, which sits in one or more tables in a MySQL
database that only understands how to respond to SQL queries
(commands).

The interaction of MySQL, PHP, and the Web server

As shown in the diagram above, the PHP scripting language is the
go-between that speaks both languages. It processes the page
request and fetches the data from the MySQL database, then spits
it out dynamically as the nicely-formatted HTML page that the
browser expects. With PHP, you can write the presentation aspects
of your site (the fancy graphics and page layouts) as “templates”
in regular HTML. Where the content belongs in those templates,
you use some PHP code to connect to the MySQL database and —
using SQL queries just like those you used to create a table of
jokes in Chapter 2 — retrieve and display some content in its
place.

Just so it’s clear and fresh in your mind, this is what will
happen when someone visits a page on our database-driven Web
site:

  • The visitor’s Web browser requests the Web page using a
    standard URL.
  • The Web server software (Apache, IIS, or whatever) recognizes
    that the requested file is a PHP script, and so the server
    interprets the file using its PHP plug-in, before responding to
    the page request.
  • Certain PHP commands (which we have yet to learn) connect to
    the MySQL database and request the content that belongs in the
    Web page.
  • The MySQL database responds by sending the requested content
    to the PHP script.
  • The PHP script stores the content into one or more PHP
    variables, and then uses the now-familiar echo function to output
    the content as part of the Web page.
  • The PHP plug-in finishes up by handing a copy of the HTML it
    has created to the Web server.
  • The Web server sends the HTML to the Web browser as it would
    a plain HTML file, except that instead of coming directly from an
    HTML file, the page is the output provided by the PHP plug-in.

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