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)

Summary

Web services are one of the most important concepts in modern-day computing, enabling many of the rich internet applications we use today. In this chapter, we have discussed some of the criteria you would want to use while evaluating web services to use in your application, such as documentation, availability, and pricing. We briefly covered the concepts of a RESTful web service, which are stateless services that expose an interface to interact with resources through the HTTP verbs. We covered the JSON and XML formats, which are hierarchical structures used to transfer data in the body of requests, among other uses.

HTTP requests are made up of a body and a number of headers, some required, some optional, and others that contain metadata about a request and negotiate the content type. We went over the authentication methods commonly utilized by web service providers, including API keys and Open ID Connect combined with OAuth 2.0 for authorization. A REST client is a useful...