0.1. What This Book Is About
This book is for developers who want to build database applications
that are integrated with the Web. It presents the principles and
techniques of developing small- to medium-scale web database
applications that store, manage, and retrieve data, as well as the
basic techniques for securing an application. The architecture we
describe is a successful framework for applications that can run on
modest hardware and process more than a million hits per day from
users.
An important feature of this book is our ongoing case study,
Hugh and Dave's Online Wines.
It's a complete but fictional online retail store
that allows users to browse and search a database of wines, add items
to a shopping cart, manage their membership, and purchase wines.
Searching, browsing, storing user data, validating user input,
managing user transactions, and security are each the subject of a
chapter, and each topic is illustrated with examples from the case
study. The completed winestore scripts are presented and briefly
discussed at the end of the book.
We use open source software. Our database management system (DBMS) is
MySQL, a system known for its suitability to applications that
require speed but low resource overheads. Our scripting language is
PHP, which is best known for its function libraries that interact
with more than 15 relational database systems, the web environment,
and many other services. We use PHP to develop the application logic
that brings together the Web and the relational database management
system (RDBMS). Apache is our web server of choice.
