Book Image

The PHP Workshop

By : Jordi Martinez, Alexandru Busuioc, David Carr, Markus Gray, Vijay Joshi, Mark McCollum, Bart McLeod, M A Hossain Tonu
Book Image

The PHP Workshop

By: Jordi Martinez, Alexandru Busuioc, David Carr, Markus Gray, Vijay Joshi, Mark McCollum, Bart McLeod, M A Hossain Tonu

Overview of this book

Do you want to build your own websites, but have never really been confident enough to turn your ideas into real projects? If your web development skills are a bit rusty, or if you've simply never programmed before, The PHP Workshop will show you how to build dynamic websites using PHP with the help of engaging examples and challenging activities. This PHP tutorial starts with an introduction to PHP, getting you set up with a productive development environment. You will write, execute, and troubleshoot your first PHP script using a built-in templating engine and server. Next, you'll learn about variables and data types, and see how conditions and loops help control the flow of a PHP program. Progressing through the chapters, you'll use HTTP methods to turn your PHP scripts into web apps, persist data by connecting to an external database, handle application errors, and improve functionality by using third-party packages. By the end of this Workshop, you'll be well-versed in web application development, and have the knowledge and skills to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with PHP.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

An Example Web Service

As a quick example, we can use a site that we will be interacting with later in the chapter using PHP, but for now, let's see what happens when you browse to https://packt.live/33iQi0M. This is a simple web service that receives the request from the client, reads the public IP address of the network that the request is coming from, and sends a response containing that IP address back to the client in a format that computers and humans can both easily read. Here is a screenshot of what you would see in your browser; however, note that the IP address would be different because it is dependent on your actual location:

Figure 10.1: Printing the IP address

This is a very simple service, but it illustrates the concepts we are trying to learn without the need for very complicated business logic. When you enter the preceding URL into your browser, you should see some curly braces, colons, and double quotes formatted around some text. The...