The first time you sign into developerWorks, a profile is created for you. Select information in your profile (name, country/region, and company) is displayed to the public and will accompany any content you post. You may update your IBM account at any time.

All information submitted is secure.

The first time you sign in to developerWorks, a profile is created for you, so you need to choose a display name. Your display name accompanies the content you post on developerworks.

Please choose a display name between 3-31 characters. Your display name must be unique in the developerWorks community and should not be your email address for privacy reasons.

All information submitted is secure.

My developerWorks:

My notifications:

Sign out

Select a language:

Kick-start takes you to the movies: Kick-start takes you to the movies, Part 2

Finishing a personal movie database application, based on PHP and DB2

Ian D. M. Hakes (ihakes@ca.ibm.com), Software Developer, EMC

Ian Hakes is one of the DB2 Express-C community facilitators bringing the Express-C product to the world. He has worked at IBM since 1999, in a variety of roles: technical writer, developer, team lead, and technical marketing. Ian holds a B.Sc.H. degree in Physics and a B.A. in English, both from Queen's University. In his spare time, Ian enjoys reading and writing novels, and playing road hockey.

Summary: Explore PHP and XML development using the Eclipse IDE, IBM® DB2® Express-C 9, and Websphere® Application Server Community Edition. Learn how to configure these applications, part of a program designed to kick-start your application development, to develop a Web-based movie information database. This is part two of a two part tutorial, covering the primary PHP code development and DB2 database configuration and data retrieval. Part 1 covered the installation and configuration of the tools, along with some basic proof-of-concept code development.

View more content in this series

Date: 29 Nov 2006
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (461 KB | 32 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 9108 views
Comments:

Welcome back!

Here at the studio, we're glad you're back to help finish off this project. The producers have given the green light to go ahead with the rest of the production, we have some A-list stars on board, and the special effects wizards have fired up the green screen. But time is money in this business, so let's get right to it.

About this tutorial

Building on your application installation, setup, and configuration steps from "Kick-start takes you to the movies, Part 1", this sequel continues exploring the Eclipse IDE, DB2 Express-C 9, and PHP to create a Web-based movie database. You'll take advantage of the Eclipse integrated development environment, the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, and the new XML capabilities of DB2 9 to build your PHP interface, search for and retrieve movie information from the Web, and save that information as an XML document in DB2. Finally, you'll tie up the loose ends, wrap the project, and start writing your acceptance speech.

Objectives

After completing this tutorial, you will understand how to store and retrieve XML data through PHP and a back end database. The applications and skills we'll cover in this specific example can be easily extrapolated into many other software development ideas for business processes.

Prerequisites

This tutorial is written for software developers and analysts whose skills and experience are at an intermediate level. You should have a general familiarity with using an integrated development environment, and a basic knowledge of PHP Web page creation, SQL, and XML.

System requirements

To complete the steps in this tutorial, you need:

Workstation for the Eclipse IDE
PHP Web server (enabled with either Apache or WebSphere Application Server Community Edition with the new alphaWorks PHP extension)
DB2 Express-C 9 database server

The tasks can be handled by three different computers, or you can set up all the applications on just one system.

The details of how to install these applications are covered in much more depth and detail elsewhere in developerWorks and on these applications' respective Web sites. See the Resources for links.

The specific product installation instructions for this tutorial were covered in Part 1. I will try to be as platform independent as possible. My Web server, DB2 database, and PHP installation are all on a Linux®-based (Red Hat Enterprise 4) system, but my Eclipse IDE is installed on a Microsoft® Windows® XP system. Of course, the setup is entirely up to you, as all of the kick-start applications are available for both Windows and Linux operating systems.

If you want to follow along with the interface creation steps, you can download the set of PHP files included with this tutorial, then use the Import function of the Eclipse IDE to bring the files into your Movie Database workspace. The alternative is to create and code them as you go along.

Comments