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 5. Web Analytics using MongoDB

In this chapter, we are going to explore and experiment with an interesting use case of MongoDB: storing website analytics. There are certain features of MongoDB (which we will discuss in this chapter) that make it an excellent choice as a backend for storing web traffic data. We can use MapReduce to process and analyze the data, measure key metrics, and generate reports. We are going to learn how to do all that by adding analytics features into the blog application that we built in Chapter 2, Building your First MongoDB Powered Web App. We will build a logger in PHP that stores HTTP request data. Then we will use MapReduce to process the data and expose certain statistics in a web dashboard. Finally, we will learn how we can leverage the upsert and $inc feature of MongoDB to store page visit counts in real time.

So to sum it up, in this chapter we will:

  • Discuss why MongoDB is a good choice for storing web analytics

  • Learn how to implement logging using...