Best PHP/MySQL practices

rmiller1985

Hi all,

I have many years of experience working with various databases, but I'm fairly new to PHP and MySQL. I know that the two are very often used together in order to access database information using web pages.

I've learned enough to understand how PHP scripts can be embedded in HTML pages, and how the entire page can be a PHP script that constructs the page. But I'm learning all this on my own, using the resources here as well as the book that I bought, "Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL" by W. Jason Gilmore (an excellent read). What I'd like to know is how PHP and MySQL are used together in the "real world."

I've stumbled through setting up a website that gets content from the database dynamically, as well as adding a login page for admin users. I know that I've written pretty clean code that works, but I don't have any idea how it compares to the code that's currently in place at real websites. I'm wondering things like:

-- Are short scripts usually embedded in pages that are mostly made up of HTML? Or are most web pages with a .php extension entire scripts, where the HTML is "echo"ed or "print"ed from within the script?

-- Do many sites make use of PHP's object-oriented properties, where objects are instantiated and used from within web pages with .php extensions? Or are most scripts just linear programs that process user input from webforms and return database data?

Other general questions have popped into my head, but they all seem to have popped out at the moment. 🙂

Anyway, any guidance from you PHP gurus out there who actually write code that is in use in real websites would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Rich

planetsim

You should scan a lot of code http://hotscripts.com has quite a bit just take a look at the most popular or more well known scripts produced.

I dont usually use a lot of OOP in my production code however I mainly use it for things such as Database, Form Validation, Templating more of your backend type work where as my prodecural type code is used to control the classes and the page.

-- Are short scripts usually embedded in pages that are mostly made up of HTML? Or are most web pages with a .php extension entire scripts, where the HTML is "echo"ed or "print"ed from within the script?

PHP pages should have the .php extension unless stated otherwise as the Type that the PHP Engine will Parse.

As for most being HTML yes and no. A good majority who begin PHP will code with HTML and PHP in the same PHP file. Although there is nothing wrong with that. I find that it made it harder to modify PHP code and it wasnt very flexible in the end. So seperating logic (PHP) and Presentation (HTML/CSS/etc) is a good thing not only does the PHP file look clean and easier to understand you can build template HTML files without worrying too much of accidently deleting some PHP or having to modify PHP code unless of course you want something different to happen .

You will find that most users here program PHP sites for the real world and arent just from books, however the good thing I find about PHP is most books are adapted for the real world so you can use some scripts from the book in the real world with no trouble of course you will learn more and eventually build a more effective script.

As for how PHP and MySQL are used the real world? take a look at this forum its PHP/MySQL SpreadFirefox.com :p is a real world site using both (wait not too sure on MySQL but defiant on PHP).

You will find other more enterprise sites do not use PHP/MySQL they tend to use other things such as .NET, JSP. The only big website that uses a scripting language is Google however they do not use PHP or MySQL. But rather Python, well a good majority of services are in Python.

PHP can of course do many of the things for the Enterprise, most feel its not mature enough yet to deal with such things and I tend to agree PHP 5 on the other hand is starting to get PHP up there as an enterprise alternative.

You will find on hotscripts.com that PHP as a lot more scripts than any language there that is because its easy to learn and use, quick to build scripts compared to languages like Java / .NET

You will also find that other users have posted similar questions on the forum so you may want to search to see what others have said in the past.