 | Level: Introductory Tyler Anderson (tyleranderson5@yahoo.com), Freelance Writer, Backstop Media
Nicholas Chase (ibmquestions@nicholaschase.com), Freelance writer, Backstop Media, LLC
21 Jun 2005 This tutorial is Part 2 of a three-part "Learning PHP" series that takes you from the most basic PHP script to working with databases and streaming from the file system by documenting the building of a document workflow system. Here, documents are uploaded by users and stored in a non-Web-accessible location for retrieval by the application in Part 3. We also look at working with XML files using DOM and SAX, and we look at exceptions.
Prerequisites
This tutorial assumes a basic familiarity with PHP to the level discussed in Part 1 of this series. That includes basic understanding of control structures, such as loops and if-then statements, as well as functions, and working with HTML forms submissions and databases. Familiarity with XML is helpful, but not required.
System requirements
You need a Web server, PHP, and a database installed and available. Unless you will be using an external hosting account, download and install the following packages:
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Web server -- Whether you're on Windows® or Linux® (or Mac OS X, for that matter), you have the option of using the Apache Web server. Feel free to choose V1.3 or V2.0, but the instructions in this tutorial will concentrate on 2.0. Download Apache. If you're on Windows, you also can use Internet Information Services, which is part of Windows.
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PHP -- PHP V4 and PHP V5 are in use at the time of this writing, but because of changes in PHP V5, we'll concentrate on that version. (The version isn't terribly important in this tutorial, but it makes a difference for the last part of this series.) Download PHP.
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Database -- Part of this project involves saving data to a database, so you'll need one of those, as well. In this tutorial, we'll concentrate on MySQL because it's so commonly used with PHP. Download MySQL.
Formats html, pdf
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