Dynamic Web Content

Introduction to Dynamic Web Content

The World Wide Web is a constantly evolving network
that has already traveled far beyond its conception in
the early 1990s, when it was created to solve a specific
problem.
State-of-the-art experiments at CERN (the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics now best known as
the operator of the Large Hadron Collider) were
producing incredible amounts of data
So much that the data was proving unwieldy to
distribute to the participating scientists who were
spread out across the world.

Introduction to Dynamic Web Content

At this time, the Internet was already in place, with
several hundred thousand computers connected to it,
so Tim Berners-Lee (a CERN fellow) devised a method
of navigating between them using a hyperlinking
framework, which came to be known as Hypertext
Transfer Protocol, or HTTP.
He also created a markup language called HTML, or
Hypertext Markup Language.
To bring these together, he wrote the first web browser
and web server, tools that we now take for granted.

Introduction to Dynamic Web Content

But back then, the concept was revolutionary.
The most connectivity so far experienced by athome modem users was dialing up and
connecting to a bulletin board that was hosted by
a single computer, where you could communicate
and swap data only with other users of that
service.
Consequently, you needed to be a member of
many bulletin board systems in order to
effectively communicate electronically with your
colleagues and friends.

Introduction to Dynamic Web Content

But Berners-Lee changed all that in one fell
swoop, and by the mid-1990s, there were
three major graphical web browsers
competing for the attention of five million
users.
It soon became obvious, though, that
something was missing.

Introduction to Dynamic Web Content

Yes, pages of text and graphics with hyperlinks
to take you to other pages was a brilliant
concept, but the results didnt reflect the
instantaneous potential of computers and the
Internet to meet the particular needs of each
user with dynamically changing content.
Using the Web was a very dry and plain
experience, even if we did now have scrolling
text and animated GIFs!

The Request/Response Procedure

At its most basic level, the request/response
process consists of a web browser asking the
web server to send it a web page and the
server sending back the page.
The browser then takes care of displaying the
page.

The basic client/server

request/response sequence
Each step in the request and
response sequence is as follows:

1. You enter http://server.com into your

browsers address bar.
2. Your browser looks up the IP address
for server.com.
3. Your browser issues a request for the
home page at server.com.
4. The request crosses the Internet and
arrives at the server.com web server.
5. The web server, having received the
request, looks for the web page on its
hard disk.
6. The web page is retrieved by the
server and returned to the browser.
7. Your browser displays the web page.

A dynamic client/server
request/response sequence
1. You enter http://server.com into
your browsers address bar.
2. Your browser looks up the IP
address for server.com.
3. Your browser issues a request to
that address for the web servers
home page.
4. The request crosses the Internet
and arrives at the server.com web
server.
5. The web server, having received the
request, fetches the home page from
its hard
disk.

A dynamic client/server
request/response sequence
6. With the home page now in memory,
the web server notices that it is a file
incorporating
PHP scripting and passes the page to the
PHP interpreter.
7. The PHP interpreter executes the PHP
code.
8. Some of the PHP contains MySQL
statements, which the PHP interpreter
now
passes to the MySQL database engine.
9. The MySQL database returns the
results of the statements back to the PHP
interpreter.
10. The PHP interpreter returns the
results of the executed PHP code, along
with the
results from the MySQL database, to the
web server.
11. The web server returns the page to
the requesting client, which displays it.

PHP, MYSQL, JAVASCRIPT, CSS, AND

HTML5

The Benefits of PHP, MySQL,

JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5
It wasnt long before the rush was on to create
Web 1.1, with the development of such browser
enhancements as Java, JavaScript, JScript
(Microsofts slight variant of JavaScript), and
ActiveX.
On the server side, progress was being made on
the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) using
scripting languages such as Perl (an alternative to
the PHP language) and server-side scripting
inserting the contents of one file (or the output
of a system call) into another one dynamically.

The Benefits of PHP, MySQL,

JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5
Once the dust had settled, three main technologies stood
head and shoulders above the others.
Although Perl was still a popular scripting language with a
strong following, PHPs simplicity and built-in links to the
MySQL database program had earned it more than double
the number of users.
And JavaScript, which had become an essential part of the
equation for dynamically manipulating CSS (Cascading Style
Sheets) and HTML, now took on the even more muscular
task of handling the client side of the Ajax process.
Under Ajax, web pages perform data handling and send
requests to web servers in the backgroundwithout the
web user being aware that this is going on.

The Benefits of PHP, MySQL,

JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5
No doubt the symbiotic nature of PHP and MySQL helped
propel them both forward, but what attracted developers to
them in the first place?
The simple answer has to be the ease with which you can use
them to quickly create dynamic elements on websites.
MySQL is a fast and powerful, yet easy-to-use, database
system that offers just about anything a website would need
in order to find and serve up data to browsers.
When PHP allies with MySQL to store and retrieve this data,
you have the fundamental parts required for the development
of social networking sites and the beginnings of Web 2.0.

And when you bring JavaScript and CSS

into the mix too, you have a recipe for
building highly dynamic and interactive
websites.

USING PHP

Using PHP
With PHP, its a simple matter to embed dynamic
activity in web pages. When you give pages the
.php extension, they have instant access to the
scripting language.

<?php
echo " Today is " . date("l") . ". ";
?>
Here's the latest news.

Using PHP
The opening <?php tells the web server to allow
the PHP program to interpret all the following
code up to the ?> tag.
Outside of this construct, everything is sent to
the client as direct HTML.
So the text Here's the latest news. is simply
output to the browser; within the PHP tags, the
built-in date function displays the current day of
the week according to the servers system time.

Using PHP
The final output of the two parts looks like
this:
Today is Wednesday. Here's the
latest news.

Using MySQL
Of course, theres not much point to being able to change
HTML output dynamically unless you also have a means to
track the changes that users make as they use your
website.
In the early days of the Web, many sites used flat text
files to store data such as usernames and passwords.
But this approach could cause problems if the file wasnt
correctly locked against corruption from multiple
simultaneous accesses.
Also, a flat file can get only so big before it becomes
unwieldy to managenot to mention the difficulty of
trying to merge files and perform complex searches in any
kind of reasonable time.

Using MySQL
Thats where relational databases with
structured querying become essential.
And MySQL, being free to use and installed on
vast numbers of Internet web servers, rises
superbly to the occasion.
It is a robust and exceptionally fast database
management system that uses English-like
commands.

Using MySQL
The highest level of MySQL structure is a
database, within which you can have one or
more tables that contain your data.
For example, lets suppose you are working
on a table called users, within which you have
created columns for surname, firstname, and
email, and you now wish to add another user.

Using MySQL
One command that you might use to do this
is:
INSERT INTO users VALUES('Smith',
'John', 'jsmith@mysite.com');

PHP + MySQL
Using PHP, you can make all calls directly to
MySQL without having to run the MySQL
program yourself or use its command-line
interface.
This means you can save the results in arrays
for processing and perform multiple lookups,
each dependent on the results returned from
earlier ones, to drill right down to the item of
data you need.

The Apache Web Server

In addition to PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS,
and HTML5, theres actually a sixth hero in the
dynamic Web: the web server.
Apache web server.
Weve discussed a little of what a web server
does during the HTTP server/ client exchange,
but it actually does much more behind the
scenes.

The Apache Web Server

For example, Apache doesnt serve up just
HTML filesit handles a wide range of files
from images and Flash files to MP3 audio files,
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, and so
on.
To do this, each element a web client
encounters in an HTML page is also requested
from the server, which then serves it up.

The Apache Web Server

But these objects dont have to be static files
such as GIF images.
They can all be generated by programs such as
PHP scripts.
Thats right: PHP can even create images and
other files for you, either on the fly or in
advance to serve up later.

The Apache Web Server

Apache also supports a huge range of modules of its
own.
In addition to the PHP module, the most important for
your purposes as a web programmer are the modules
that handle security.
Other examples are the Rewrite module, which enables
the web server to handle a varying range of URL types
and rewrite them to its own internal requirements, and
the Proxy module, which you can use to serve up
often-requested pages from a cache to ease the load
on the server.

IS OPEN SOURCE QUALITY OF THESE

TECHNOLOGIES THE REASON WHY THEY ARE
SO POPULAR?

About Open Source

Whether the open source quality of these
technologies is the reason they are so popular
has often been debated, but PHP, MySQL, and
Apache are the three most commonly used
tools in their categories.

About Open Source

What can be said definitively, though, is that
their being open source means that they have
been developed in the community by teams of
programmers writing the features they
themselves want and need, with the original
code available for all to see and change.
Bugs can be found and security breaches can
be prevented before they happen.

About Open Source

Theres another benefit: all these programs
are free to use.
Theres no worrying about having to purchase
additional licenses if you have to scale up your
website and add more servers.
And you dont need to check the budget
before deciding whether to upgrade to the
latest versions of these products.

Bringing It All Together

The real beauty of PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 is the
wonderful way in which they all work together to produce dynamic web
content.
PHP handles all the main work on the web server
MySQL manages all the data
and the combination of CSS and JavaScript looks after web page
presentation.
JavaScript can also talk with your PHP code on the web server whenever it
needs to update something (either on the server or on the web page).
And with the powerful new features in HTML5, such as the canvas, audio
and video, and geolocation, you can make your web pages highly dynamic,
interactive, and multimedia packed.