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✦  Building applications: Web sites frequently provide similar functionali-
ties. For instance, dynamic Web sites need to collect information in
HTML forms and process the information. You need to know how to use
PHP and MySQL to provide the specific functionality your Web site
needs.
✦  Security: You need to protect your Web site and the data your users pro-
vide from people with malicious intentions.
This book provides all the information you need to build dynamic Web sites
that are quite complex. The book is intended as a reference, not a tutorial.
Each minibook provides information on a different aspect of building
dynamic Web sites.

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AJAX is a complex phenomenon that means different things to different people.
Computer users appreciate that their favorite websites are now friendlier and feel
more responsive. Web developers learn new skills that empower them to create sleek
web applications with little effort. Indeed, everything sounds good about AJAX!
At its roots, AJAX is a mix of technologies that lets you get rid of the evil page
reload, which represents the dead time when navigating from one page to another.
Eliminating page reloads is just one step away from enabling more complex features
into websites, such as real-time data validation, drag-and-drop, and other tasks
that weren't traditionally associated with web applications. Although the AJAX
ingredients are mature (the XMLHttpRequest object, which is the heart of AJAX,
was created by Microsoft in 1999), their new role in the new wave of web trends is
very young, and we'll witness a number of changes before these technologies will be
properly used to the best benefit of the end users.
AJAX isn't, of course, the answer to all the Web's problems, as the current hype
around it may suggest. As with any other technology, AJAX can be overused, or
used the wrong way. AJAX also comes with problems of its own: you need to fight
with browser inconsistencies, AJAX-specific pages don't work on browsers without
JavaScript, they can't be easily bookmarked by users, and search engines don't
always know how to parse them. Also, not everyone likes AJAX. While some are
developing enterprise architectures using JavaScript, others prefer not to use it at all.
When the hype is over, most will probably agree that the middle way is the wisest
way to go for most scenarios.
In AJAX and PHP: Building Modern Web Applications – Second Edition, we take a
pragmatic and safe approach by teaching relevant patterns and best practices that we
think any web developer will need sooner or later. We teach you how to avoid the
common pitfalls, how to write efficient AJAX code, and how to achieve functionality
that is easy to integrate into current and future web applications, without requiring
you to rebuild the whole solution around AJAX. You'll be able to use the knowledge
you learn from this book right away, in your PHP web applications.

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What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 introduces object-oriented programming and how it fits for PHP. Some benefits of functional programming over procedural programming are highlighted.

In Chapter 2 you learn to create objects and define their properties and methods. Details of classes, properties, and methods follow, along with the scope of methods. This chapter shows you the benefits of using interfaces and a few other basic OOP features in PHP to kick start your journey through OOPing in PHP.

Now that you have got your basics done for OOP in PHP, Chapter 3 helps you to strengthen your base. It helps you to deal with more details and some advanced features. For example, you learn about class information functions, which allows you to investigate details of any class. This chapter takes you through some handy object-oriented information functions, exception handling, iterators, and storing objects using serialization.

In Chapter 4 you learn some of the Design Patterns and how to implement them in PHP. These are an essential part of OOP and make your code more effective, more efficient, and easier to maintain. Sometimes we implement these design patterns in our code without knowing that these solutions are defined by design patterns. Proper usage of the correct pattern can make your code perform better; similarly using them improperly could make your code slower and less efficient.

Chapter 5 focuses on two very important features of object-oriented programming in PHP, reflection and unit testing. PHP5 replaces many old APIs with smarter new ones. One of these is the Reflection API, with which you can reverse or engineer any class or object to figure out its properties and methods. You can invoke those methods dynamically and more. Unit testing is an essential part of good, stable, and manageable application design. We focus on one very popular package, PHPUnit, which is a port of JUnit to PHP. If you follow the guidelines provided in this chapter you will be able to design your own unit tests successfully. Some built-in objects and interfaces in PHP make life much easier for PHP developers.

In Chapter 6 you will learn about the huge object repository named the Standard PHP Library or SPL.

Chapter 7: In this chapter we discuss the improved MySQL API known as MySQLi and take a basic look at PHP Data Objects (PDO), adoDB, and PEAR::MDB2. We take a look at the Active Record pattern in PHP using adoDB’s active record library and the Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) pattern using Propel. We focus on some specific topics that are interesting for PHP developers doing database access the OO way.

In Chapter 8, you learn to process XML with PHP. You get to know about different APIs like the SimpleXML API to read XML and the DOMDocument object to parse and create XML documents.

Chapter 9: In Chapter 4 you learned how design patterns can simplify your daily life in programming by providing you with a common approach for solving problems. One of the most used design patterns for application architecture is Model-View-Controller (MVC). In this chapter we discuss the basic structure of MVC frameworks and then introduce you to some of these popular frameworks. Frameworks play a very important role in Rapid Development of PHP applications. You will learn how to build a framework in this chapter, which will also help you to understand object loading, data abstraction layers, and the importance of separation and finally you get a closer look at how applications are done.

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If you set out to develop a web application, you need to choose a technology that has
several important characteristics. You need to generate large amounts of dynamic
HTML conveniently. You require access to databases and other services. The
technology must provide an architectural foundation for performance and stability.
Finally, you must be able to partition your program logic in a way that allows for
future growth and maintainability.

The first web applications used the CGI (Common Gateway Interface) mechanism
and a collection of server-side scripts, typically written in Perl, but occasionally in C,
Python, PHP or other languages. There are numerous problems with this approach.
The CGI mechanism does not scale well since every web request spawns a new server
process. Communication between processes—for example, to share resources such as
database connections—is extremely awkward to program. And finally, exotic
programming languages may have their charm but they lack the ability to do the
“heavy lifting”. Features such as database access or security are typically not part of
the language but supplied by a non-standard third-party library. That puts the
programmer at the mercy of not only the implementors of the language itself but also
the providers of various third-party libraries.

Java programmers have enjoyed the power of servlets for some time, which solves
many of these problems. Servlets are programmed in Java, a language that is widely
supported. Java has built-in features for database access, networking, multithreading,security, and so on. Each servlet executes in its own thread, thus avoiding the cost of
generating server processes. Servlets can easily share resources such as session state
and database connections. The principal disadvantage of servlets is that it is plainly
tedious to generate HTML. All HTML must be generated programmatically, by
statements that print all the text and tags. In particular, that means that the pages are
generated by programmers. We all know what can happen when programmers try
their hand at web design.

An increasingly popular approach in recent years has been the use of web server
scripting languages such as Netscape LiveWire and Microsoft ASP (Active Server
Pages). With these systems, a programmer embeds code snippets into web pages. The
pages themselves can be professionally designed by a web designer. The web server
executes the code snippets when serving the page, inserting the HTML that results
from the execution of each snippet. The advantage of this approach—and the reason
for its popularity—is that you can get simple results very quickly. But what looks like
fun and great productivity early on turns out to be a maintenance nightmare later.
When you intermingle the presentation (the static parts of the HTML pages) and the
business logic (the code snippets), it becomes very difficult to change either when the
need arises. Web designers will not know how how to move the code around when
redesigning the pages. This makes any redesign a costly affair involving frequent
interaction between programmers and web designers. Finally, keep in mind that you
are tied into a particular web server. For example, if you develop your application in
ASP and later want to use Apache instead of Microsoft IIS, you are stuck.

The JSP technology that is the topic of this book overcomes these issues. JSP has the
same advantages as servlets—in fact, JSP pages are servlets. You use the full power
of the Java language, and not some scripting language, to implement your business
logic. By using beans, XML transformations, and tag libraries, JSP lets you separate
the presentation logic and business logic. For example, in a well-structured JSP
application, you can have the same business logic with multiple interfaces, giving
your users the choice to use a regular web browsers or a mobile phones that uses
WAP (the wireless access protocol).

This book teaches you how to build robust and scalable web applications with JSP. It
covers the JSP syntax, the features that JSP inherits from servlets such as session
management, the interaction between servlets and beans, a number of useful Java
topics such as JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) and XML. Finally, and most
importantly, you will learn about application partitioning and deployment—these
subjects make all the difference between a quick hack and a robust application that
will withstand the test of time.

Unlike other books, this book takes a properly JSP-centric approach, in accordance
with the recommendations that Sun Microsystems makes in their Java Enterprise
blueprints. This is very appropriate and a major strength. Where other books start out
with servlets and discuss JSP as a second method for web programming, this book
shows you why JSP pages have a higher position in the food chain. A JSP page can do
everything a servlet can, but where you have to do a lot of tedious programming and
organizing when you use servlets, JSP has higher level capabilities that let you focus
on your business problems instead.

In the spirit of the Core series, this book contains is plenty of real-world advice that
you won’t find in the online documentation. The authors don’t dwell on tedious syntax
and boring minutiae. Unlike so many computer book authors, they have done the hard
work and separated the wheat from the chaff. You won’t waste time studying features
that you won’t use, but you will find good coverage of those subjects that you actually
need when building real applications. I am confident you will find this Core book
truly useful. I hope you enjoy it and have the opportunity to use it for building great
web applications.

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Working with the usual markup language of a web page, scripting languages enable clients to demandspecific information from their servers, and their servers, in turn, to receive important user input in orderto process and display data on demand.

In the forefront of this advancement has been the Open Source community, dedicated in providing web-based solutions purely for the love of the technology itself. Open source is not only about free software(though not everything is free anyway), but it is about, as the name suggests, being open about the sourceof the code.

Having free access to the source means that authors are forced to keep to standards. If these are notmaintained, the deviation is labeled a bug, and if the author doesn’t fix it, someone else will. Largenumbers of independent programmers being able to understand what a program does, and ensuring thatstandards are maintained, prevents the author from being able to exploit the user, as happens in thecommercial software world.

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