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

Chapter 3. Building a Session Manager

In the previous chapter, we learned how to use PHP to store and retrieve data to and from a MongoDB database and built a very basic web application while we were at it. This time we will use that knowledge to build something more practical. We are going to build a session manager in PHP, a module that will handle the HTTP session of a visitor in a website, using MongoDB for storing the session data. Why a session manager? Because it is one of those components that you are going to need when building a user facing web application; implementing basic but important functionalities such as signing in a user (authentication), tracking his/her activities, authorizing his/her actions, and logging him/her out. We will use object-oriented programming principles for building the module, so that it can be used in any web application with little or no change. We will also build a separate module for user authentication, which will be used by the session manager...