Subtitles of the Movie

Now let's take a look at the tools that you'll need in order to become productive with PHP. In our last movie we looked at the hardware that will be needed to run a dynamic website on the web. So the purposes of development we can get away without most of this, and simply use a single machine with the right kind of software. Let's take a look in detail at the software that you're going to need in order to develop your PHP scripts and to test them out on your machine. First of all you're going to need some server software, your choice of server software will depend to a greater or lesser extent on the kind of platform that you're running. The Apache Web Server runs on both Windows and Linux and whole range of UNIX and GNU systems. There’s also Microsoft IIS, which only runs in Windows and this is also a good product. I wouldn't recommend PWS Microsoft's earlier Personal Web Server software that shipped, I believe with Windows 98. PWS is giving me no end of trouble. So I recommend that if you go with the Microsoft product you use IIS rather than PWS. There are also range of other Server Software Technology available such as Zues, Zatami and a whole raft of others. But a choice has to be made as to what server you’re going to run on your machine. For the purposes of this title, I’m going to be running Apache on my Windows machine. The PHP engine is the next that your going to need to be running on your machine. And this is available from the PHP website www.php.net . And this is available in different flavors, depending on how comfortable you are with compiling or installing, you can download the source code if you want to compile it yourself. You can also download pre compiled binaries available for a whole number of different platforms. And for very popular platforms there are also installations available that pretty much install themselves. The documentation on the PHP website is pretty comprehensive, as regards the different platforms and the installation instructions, installing on this different platforms. Your also are going to need a text editor, to write your PHP script with. Now there are whole range of different products edit pad, and text pad, for Windows. Notepad comes free with the Windows. There are number of problems with Notepad, such as it’s tendency to add the TXT extension to any file it saves, which is not very useful when you trying to save a PHP script or any other kind of script that requires is specific extension. However you can use Notepad if you wish. For the Linux platform, there are also such packages as EMACS, and vim all of them are far from Notepad good text editors. I in no way intended in endorse any of these products or recommend any of them. We're going to be using edit pad for the purpose of this title, but you could use edit text editor that you wanted. You're also going to need a web browser to preview your work. Now it doesn't matter which web browser you use. We're going to be using Microsoft Internet Explorer, we could also use Netscape, Opera, Mozilla or any of the whole range of other web browsers. Because as we saw in the last movie PHP scripts executed on the server the capacities, capabilities of the web browser are irrelevant to previewing PHP scripts. so as long as the web browser works and it can read HTML then it's satisfactory for our purposes. You're going to need a database management system if you’re intending to use your PHP script for database connectivity. Once again it's your own personal preference and needs that should determine which database management system you go for. Be it Oracle, My SQL post sql and MS SQL Server, for the purposes of this title, we're going to be using My SQL, which is also available under an open source license for non commercial use. One other thing that I should add about writing PHP scripts is, that while the most common way of doing it is by using a text editor and a web browser. And that works perfectly well. You can also replace both of these with an integrated development environment. Now there is no particular product that is endorsed by the PHP organization. but there are number available on the market such as PHP coder that allow for an integrated scripting space, and a preview space which effectively integrates a browser into the text editor.