Book Image

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide

Book Image

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

With the rise of Web 2.0, the need for a highly scalable database, capable of storing diverse user-generated content is increasing. MongoDB, an open-source, non-relational database has stepped up to meet this demand and is being used in some of the most popular websites in the world. MongoDB is one of the NoSQL databases which is gaining popularity for developing PHP Web 2.0 applications.PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is a fast-paced, hands-on guide to get started with web application development using PHP and MongoDB. The book follows a “Code first, explain later” approach, using practical examples in PHP to demonstrate unique features of MongoDB. It does not overwhelm you with information (or starve you of it), but gives you enough to get a solid practical grasp on the concepts.The book starts by introducing the underlying concepts of MongoDB. Each chapter contains practical examples in PHP that teache specific features of the database.The book teaches you to build a blogging application, handle user sessions and authentication, and perform aggregation with MapReduce. You will learn unique MongoDB features and solve interesting problems like real-time analytics, location-aware web apps etc. You will be guided to use MongoDB alongside MySQL to build a diverse data back-end. With its concise coverage of concepts and numerous practical examples, PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is the right choice for the PHP developer to get started with learning MongoDB.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
PHP and MongoDB Web Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

The motivation behind using MongoDB and an RDBMS together


Relational databases have been around for decades. Programmers have built countless applications, web-based or otherwise, on top of such databases. If the domain of the problem is relational, then using an RDBMS is an obvious choice. The real-world entities are mapped into tables, and the relationships among the entities are maintained using more tables (or foreign key constraints). But there could be some parts of the problem domain where using a relational data model will not be the best approach, and perhaps we may need a data store that supports a flexible schema. In such scenarios, we could use a document-oriented data storage solution such as MongoDB. The application code will have separate modules for accessing and manipulating the data of the RDBMS and that of MongoDB.

Potential use cases

Let's look at some potential use cases where we can employ MongoDB alongside a relational database system:

  • Storing results of aggregation...