Ask About PHP

Coach Wei was wondering why ‘Cool Kids’ choose Ruby or PHP over Java? In his post, the power of Java is a “perfect fit for the areas where websites may need more than markups or scripting, such as middleware logic”, whereas PHP or Ruby are not ideal for building such middleware.

For example, PHP (and Ruby) are good for simple and lightweight implementations, but sites like Facebook which started with PHP, should be ideal for Java because of it’s growing complexity.

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A buddy of mine, Chris, recently did a presentation about Microsoft’s efforts to embrace non-MS technology - like PHP. This presentation was held during the December meet-up of the Singapore PHP User Group.

His video presentation was about an hour long, and covered the following topics:

• SQL Server PHP driver
• Open XML and PHP
• Cardspace and PHP
• Live Services and PHP
• Silverlight and PHP
• Server Core , IIS7, PHP and MySQL

So, go ahead and watch the video…

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One of the most frustrating thing about using open-source applications is that you never know what are some of the default obscure settings the application comes with. It doesn’t help when I add my own stupidity into the equation.

I found out today, 3 months after this site went live, wondering why it still hasn’t been indexed by the big ‘G’. It turns out that Wordpress, by default, has the privacy setting turn on, preventing search engines like Yahoo and Google to index the pages on this site! Doh!

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The main assignment operator is ‘=’, which basically assigns a value on the right to a variable on the left. If you think this is the same as an equal sign in mathematics, don’t! Think of it as a ‘assigned to’ so whatever is on the right is assigned to the left.

Here’s a simple example:

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There are various kinds of operators used in PHP, but we’re going to start with the most basic and commonly known operator - the Math operators.

What are operators? They are basically a special set of characters (or symbols, if you like) which tells PHP to perform a certain operation. For example, the ‘+’ (plus sign) is used for arithmetic adding of 2 values or variables.

Now you know why I’m starting with the Math operators, cos anyone who has had any basis schooling in Mathematics will be familiar with the Math operators.

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Last year, on 31 March 2007, the good folks at Sydney turned off their lights for 1 hour - Earth Hour. By doing so, they’ve made it possible for each and every one of us to take an action on global warming.

Earth Hour is back for 2008 and now other cities around the world, like Toronto, Chicago and many more getting into the act. Are you?

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Adding comments to PHP code is a very useful practice. Comments allows you to add some descriptive text that you can use to document or remind you on what the various parts of the PHP script is doing.

Comments are not sent to the browser, so it won’t be visible in the actual page you load in your browser, but it will be visible in your text editor you use for writing your PHP script.

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In PHP, you can use something called a ‘variable‘ to store values or reference to things. It’s like a container which you can put some thing or things inside which can be easily passed around.

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When anyone starts learning something new these days, they tend to get overloaded with more information that they can handle. The same goes for trying to pick up PHP, the shear number of books available on this one topic is staggering. Luckily, there are some great books specially catered to beginners, and this book is one of them.

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Now that you know how to use XAMPP Lite, it’s time to write your first PHP script.

This tutorial will guide you on writing your first PHP script, show you how the PHP syntax is used, and where to put and run your PHP pages in XAMPP.

Note: this tutorial assumes you are using XAMPP Lite environment for your PHP scripts. If you want to setup your own XAMPP Lite environment, follow this tutorial about installing XAMPP Lite on a portable device.

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