What commands would I use from the MySQL command line to recreate a large database table's structure without having to type it all back in through the MySQL Administrator or PHP-MyAdmin graphical user interface?
So, where was I? Oh yes, last week I was wrestling with hosting providers to get the right version of PHP and playing with WAMP and XAMPP to test PHP-based applications. If my comment about “what was I doing” sounds like I’ve lost track, it’s true, and I’ll come to why in a moment.
Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL and PHP - the widely used LAMP platform - are key parts in a recently-built voicemail system that is helping displaced residents of the Gulf Coast keep in touch with family and friends around the country. LAMP technology is the engine running contactdlovedones.org, a project that provides freely accessible voicemail services to people who had to evacuate their homes due to Hurricane Katrina.
If the thought of diving into yet another hot new technology gives you a headache, I sympathize. I've stuck mainly to PHP and Perl for years, happily ignoring most other development fads.
The combination of Apache, PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin and Zend Optimizer (see editorial links for each) is a pretty powerful setup under Linux (hence the references to LAMP - Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP/Perl/Python). That is given the maturity of each component and the huge amount of software (particularly open source) that relies on this configuration.
Digg.com credits two particular features of its LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server cluster for helping the news aggregation site maintain speedy performance in the face of high growth.
Object-Oriented PHP by Peter Lavin teaches the fundamentals of object-oriented programming (OOP) by guiding the reader through a series of inter-related example classes. There are two audiences that will benefit most from reading this book and working through the projects: primarily PHP developers who write procedural code but want to learn OOP, but also developers who use OOP in other languages but want to an introductory exploration of PHP.
The current stars of the open source movement are five packages, four of which so often go together that they have their own acronym - LAMP. That stands for Linux (operating system), Apache (Web server), MySQL (database server) and PHP (scripting language).