Book Image

Learning PHP 7

By : Antonio L Zapata (GBP)
Book Image

Learning PHP 7

By: Antonio L Zapata (GBP)

Overview of this book

PHP is a great language for building web applications. It is essentially a server-side scripting language that is also used for general purpose programming. PHP 7 is the latest version with a host of new features, and it provides major backwards-compatibility breaks. This book begins with the fundamentals of PHP programming by covering the basic concepts such as variables, functions, class, and objects. You will set up PHP server on your machine and learn to read and write procedural PHP code. After getting an understanding of OOP as a paradigm, you will execute MySQL queries on your database. Moving on, you will find out how to use MVC to create applications from scratch and add tests. Then, you will build REST APIs and perform behavioral tests on your applications. By the end of the book, you will have the skills required to read and write files, debug, test, and work with MySQL.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning PHP 7
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The MVC pattern


So far, each time we have had to add a feature, we added a new PHP file with a mixture of PHP and HTML for that specific page. For chunks of code with a single purpose, and which we have to reuse, we created functions and added them to the functions file. Even for very small web applications like ours, the code starts becoming very confusing, and the ability to reuse code is not as helpful as it could be. Now imagine an application with a large number of features: that would be pretty much chaos itself.

The problems do not stop here. In our code, we have mixed HTML and PHP code in a single file. That will give us a lot of trouble when trying to change the design of the web application, or even if we want to perform a very small change across all pages, such as changing the menu or footer of the page. The more complex the application, the more problems we will encounter.

MVC came up as a pattern to help us divide the different parts of the application. These parts are known...