Before we leap forward, it’s worth taking a step back for a clear picture of our ultimate
goal. We have two powerful tools at our disposal: the PHP scripting language
and the MySQL database engine. It’s important to understand how these will fit
together.
The whole idea of a database driven website is to allow the content of the site to
reside in a database, so that content may be pulled dynamically from the database
to create web pages for viewing on a regular browser. So, at one end of the system
you have a visitor to your site using a web browser to request a page. That browser
expects to receive a standard HTML document in return.
Just so it’s clear and fresh in your mind, this is what happens when there’s a visitor
to a page on your database driven website:
1. The visitor’s web browser requests the web page from your web server.
2. The web server software (typically Apache) recognizes that the requested file
is a PHP script, so the server fires up the PHP interpreter to execute the code
contained in the file.
3. Certain PHP commands (which will be the focus of this chapter) connect to the
MySQL database and request the content that belongs in the web page.
4. The MySQL database responds by sending the requested content to the PHP
script.
5. The PHP script stores the content into one or more PHP variables, then uses
echo statements to output the content as part of the web page.
6. The PHP interpreter finishes up by handing a copy of the HTML it has created
to the web server.
7. The web server sends the HTML to the web browser as it would a plain HTML
file, except that instead of coming directly from an HTML file, the page is the
output provided by the PHP interpreter. The browser has no way of knowing
this, however. From its perspective, it’s requesting and receiving a web page
like any other.
Here’s how you use PDO to establish a connection to a MySQL server:
new PDO('mysql:host=hostname;dbname=database', 'username',
'password')
goal. We have two powerful tools at our disposal: the PHP scripting language
and the MySQL database engine. It’s important to understand how these will fit
together.
The whole idea of a database driven website is to allow the content of the site to
reside in a database, so that content may be pulled dynamically from the database
to create web pages for viewing on a regular browser. So, at one end of the system
you have a visitor to your site using a web browser to request a page. That browser
expects to receive a standard HTML document in return.
Just so it’s clear and fresh in your mind, this is what happens when there’s a visitor
to a page on your database driven website:
1. The visitor’s web browser requests the web page from your web server.
2. The web server software (typically Apache) recognizes that the requested file
is a PHP script, so the server fires up the PHP interpreter to execute the code
contained in the file.
3. Certain PHP commands (which will be the focus of this chapter) connect to the
MySQL database and request the content that belongs in the web page.
4. The MySQL database responds by sending the requested content to the PHP
script.
5. The PHP script stores the content into one or more PHP variables, then uses
echo statements to output the content as part of the web page.
6. The PHP interpreter finishes up by handing a copy of the HTML it has created
to the web server.
7. The web server sends the HTML to the web browser as it would a plain HTML
file, except that instead of coming directly from an HTML file, the page is the
output provided by the PHP interpreter. The browser has no way of knowing
this, however. From its perspective, it’s requesting and receiving a web page
like any other.
Here’s how you use PDO to establish a connection to a MySQL server:
new PDO('mysql:host=hostname;dbname=database', 'username',
'password')
