Book Image

CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide

By : Tim Juravich
Book Image

CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide

By: Tim Juravich

Overview of this book

CouchDB is a NoSQL database which is making waves in the development world. It's the tool of choice for many PHP developers so they need to understand the robust features of CouchDB and the tools that are available to them.CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide will teach you the basics and fundamentals of using CouchDB within a project. You will learn how to build an application from beginning to end, learning the difference between the "quick way"ù to do things, and the "right way"ù by looking through a variety of code examples and real world scenarios. You will start with a walkthrough of setting up a sound development environment and then learn to create a variety of documents manually and programmatically. You will also learn how to manage their source control with Git and keep track of their progress. With each new concept, such as adding users and posts to your application, the author will take you through code step-by-step and explain how to use CouchDB's robust features. Finally, you will learn how to easily deploy your application and how to use simple replication to scale your application.

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CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide
Tim Juravich
Jun, 2012 | 304 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide
CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to CouchDB
Introduction to CouchDB
The NoSQL database evolution
Introduction to CouchDB
Summary
2
Setting up your Development Environment
Setting up your Development Environment
Operating systems
Setting up your web development environment on Mac OS X
Time for action — using Terminal to show hidden files
Time for action — opening your web browser
Time for action — checking your PHP version
Time for action — making sure that Apache can connect to PHP
Time for action — creating a quick info page
Time for action — further configuration of Apache
Time for action — installing Homebrew
Time for action — installing CouchDB
Checking that our setup is complete
Time for action — checking that CouchDB is running
Installing version control
Time for action — installing and configuring Git
Did you have any problems?
Summary
3
Getting Started with CouchDB and Futon
Getting Started with CouchDB and Futon
What is CouchDB?
Time for action — getting a list of all databases in CouchDB
Time for action — creating new databases in CouchDB
Time for action — deleting a database In CouchDB
Time for action — creating a CouchDB document
Futon
Time for action — updating a document in Futon
Time for action — creating a document in Futon
Security
Time for action — taking CouchDB out of Admin Party
Time for action — anonymously accessing the _users database
Time for action — securing the _users database
Time for action — checking to make sure the database is secure
Time for action — accessing a database with security enabled
Summary
4
Starting your Application
Starting your Application
What we'll build in this book
Bones
Project setup
Time for action — creating the directories for Verge
Time for action — initializing a Git repository
Implementing basic routing
Time for action — creating our first file: index.php
Time for action — creating the .htaccess file
Time for action — hooking up our application to Bones
Time for action — creating the class structure of Bones
Time for action — creating functions to access the route on Bones creation
Time for action — creating the register function to match routes
Time for action — creating a get function in our Bones class
Time for action — creating routes for us to test against Bones
Handling layouts and views
Time for action — using constants to get the location of the working directory
Time for action — allowing Bones to store variables and the content path
Time for action — allowing our application to display a view by calling it in index.php
Time for action — creating a simple layout file
Time for action — rendering views inside of our routes
Time for action — creating views
Adding support for other HTTP methods
Time for action — retrieving the HTTP method used in a request
Time for action — altering the register to support different methods
Time for action — adding simple but powerful helpers to Bones
Adding support for complex routing
Adding support for public files
Time for action — altering .htaccess to support public files
Time for action — creating a stylesheet for the application
Publishing your code to GitHub
Get complete code from GitHub
Summary
5
Connecting your Application to CouchDB
Connecting your Application to CouchDB
Before we get started
Time for action — creating a database for Verge with curl
Diving in head first
Time for action — adding an e-mail field to the signup form
Time for action — creating a standard object to encode to JSON
Time for action — creating a CouchDB document with PHP and curl
Available CouchDB libraries
Sag
Time for action — using Git to install Sag
Time for action — adding Sag to Bones
Time for action — creating a document with Sag
Time for action — including the classes directory
Time for action — creating a Base object
Time for action — creating a User object
Time for action — plugging the User object in
Wrapping up
Summary
6
Modeling Users
Modeling Users
Before we get started
Time for action — installing Bootstrap locally
Time for action — including Bootstrap and adjusting our layout to work with it
Time for action — sprucing up the home page
Time for action — organizing our user views
Designing our user documents
Time for action — adding the fields to support the user documents
The signup process
Time for action — handling simple user signup
Time for action — cleaning up the signup process
Exception handling and resolving errors
Time for action — examining Apache's log
Time for action : Examine CouchDB's log
Time for action — handling document update conflicts using SagCouchException
Time for action — showing alerts
User authentication
Time for action — adding functionality for users to log in
Time for action – adding functionality for users to log out
Time for action – handling the current user
Summary
7
User Profiles and Modeling Posts
User Profiles and Modeling Posts
User profile
Time for action — getting single user documents
Time for action — creating a route for user profiles
Time for action — creating the user profile
Time for action — examining Apache's log
Time for action — handling 500 errors with Bones
Time for action — handling exceptions
Time for action : handling 404 errors with Bones
Time for action — handling 404 errors with Bones
Time for action — checking whether a user is currently logged in
Posts
Creating posts
Time for action — making a function to handle Post creation
Time for action — making a form to enable Post creation
Time for action — creating a route and handling the creation of the Post
Wrapping up
Summary
8
Using Design Documents for Views and Validation
Using Design Documents for Views and Validation
Design documents
Time for action — creating a temporary view
Time for action — creating a view for listing posts
Time for action — querying the posts_by_user view
Time for action — adding support to get_posts_by_user in the post class
Time for action — adding posts to the user profile
Time for action — creating the reduce function in Futon
Time for action — adding support to our application to consume the reduce function
Time for action — adding support for $_rev to our classes
Time for action — adding support to delete posts in our application
Time for action — adding a validate function to ensure that only creators can update or delete their documents
Time for action – hiding the delete buttons when not on the current user's profile
Wrapping up
Summary
9
Adding Bells and Whistles to your Application
Adding Bells and Whistles to your Application
Adding jQuery to our project
Time for action — adding jQuery to our project
Time for action — creating master.js and connecting Boostrap's JavaScript files
Using jQuery to improve our site
Time for action — improving our user experience by using AJAX to delete posts
Adding simple pagination using jQuery
Time for action — taking posts out of profile.php and putting them in their own partial view
Time for action — adjusting our get_posts_by_user function to skip and limit posts
Time for action — refactoring our code so it's not redundant
Time for action — adding frontend support for pagination
Time for action — fixing our delete post function to work with pagination
Using Gravatars
Time for action — adding Gravatars to our application
Summary
10
Deploying your Application
Deploying your Application
Before we get started
Database hosting with Cloudant
Configuring our project
Time for action — creating a configuration class
Time for action — adding our configuration file to Bones
Application hosting with PHP Fog
Replicating local data to production
Time for action — replicating our local _users database to Cloudant
What's next?
Summary
Pop quiz — Answers
Pop quiz — Answers
Chapter 2, Setting up your Development Environment
Chapter 3, Getting Started with CouchDB and Futon

Exception handling and resolving errors

If you were to try to go back to your signup form and save another document with the name John Doe, you would see a pretty unfriendly error page that looks something similar to the following screenshot:

If you are using a browser other than Chrome, you probably received a different message, but the result is still the same. Something bad happened that we didn't expect, and even worse, we aren't capturing these exceptions.

What happens when something goes wrong? How will we figure out what broke? The answer is: we look at the logs.

Deciphering error logs

When PHP and Apache are working together, they produce a lot of logs for us to look at. Some are access-level logs, and others are error-level. So let's see if we can investigate what's happening here by looking at the Apache error log.

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