Total Noob: Basic organization, global variables

Code_Basher

Ok, so I am an old dog learning new tricks, but I have never worked in web development before.

I have a web app idea that I would like to try and have done a lot of work building my skillset and I can manage the
components individually (html/javascript/mySQL/PHP), but it is bringing it together where I am having issues.

I do not want to make a fatal decision right off the bat as web and security are kind of important.

My issue at this time is related to passing variables from program to program (globals of course).

I prefer to start from the very start of course.

How do I securely store variables in memory and pass them from program to program. I tried this in a quick php program..

if (isset($glob_x)){
echo "glob x has a value of $glob_x";
}
else{
global $glob_x;
echo "initializing glob X";
$glob_x = 0;
}

$glob_x = $glob_x + 3;
echo "x = $glob_x";

When I call the PHP program from the HTML page, it does not carry the value from one activation to the next. So my variable glob_x does not increment as I want it to.

I aplogize for my noobishness :p

NogDog

I would suggest reading up on PHP sessions, and see if that looks like what you need.

Code_Basher

NogDog;11025837 wrote:
I would suggest reading up on PHP sessions, and see if that looks like what you need.

That seems like the right thing. This is what happens when you do not take formal classes I suppose :p

I will spend a bit more time in my design to get sessions figured out. I was aware of them, but did not think that I would use it in such a manner.

Thanks

sneakyimp

Welcome to PHPBuilder!

One of the first things you must come to grips with in working with PHP in a web server context is to understand that HTTP is a stateless protocol. I don't really know in any great detail what that means but I believe that it means that subsequent HTTP requests don't necessarily know anything about what happened before. The only way for a client and an HTTP server to have a conversation with any "memory" at all (such that subsequent page requests know what happened before), you have to pass some kind of token back and forth. PHP Sessions depend on the presence and sharing of a session id either passed back and forth as a cookie or in the query string.

The basic idea is that a new visitor is assigned a unique session id --different than any other user's session id -- by the web server. With each subsequent page request, the client must be sure to supply that session id so that the server can distinguish them from everyone else.