Building a Blog with Dreamweaver, PHP, and MySQL

Discussion in 'Web Development & Web Hosting' started by Mitzs, Nov 7, 2007.

  1. Mitzs
    Honorary Member

    Mitzs Ducktape Goddess

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    At the moment this is over my head but one of the things I do want to learn down the road.

    The question I have is, why are so many different severs required for this thing. And can I use the apache sever instead of the IIS sever on windows? Someone told me that the IIS sever was full of holes.


    http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/php_blog1.html
     
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  2. greenbrucelee
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    greenbrucelee Zettabyte Poster

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    Don't quote me on this but I am sure Apache is fine (I saw it running once, I think)but I would wait untill some doing CIW is on here to reply.

    And to the other ponit there are lots of things on Windows with holes but there are on every OS.
     
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  3. hbroomhall

    hbroomhall Petabyte Poster Gold Member

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    I assume you want to do it this way for the learning and practice, otherwise if you just want a blog there are plenty of pre-built ones out there!

    That list isn't particularly long, but I'll try and explain what the items are:

    OS - this should be obvious :biggrin

    Web server - something has to respond to the browser, and that is the web server. I'd prefer Apache 2.2 over the earlier version, and definitely over IIS. Unless you need to use IIS for other reasons.

    One of the problems with the WWW is that it is 'stateless' on it's own. Your browser connects, fetches a page and disconnects. The next time you do this exactly the same happens. The web-server keeps no record that you did this (other than logs).

    To get the sort of interactive content of a blog, or even a forum like this, you need a database behind it to store what people do in an accessible manner. That is what MySQL is for (although the version given is antique!).

    Next you need the 'glue' between the database and the web-page. This makes the HTML of the web-page dynamic, and builds it on-the-fly. You use a scripting language for that and PHP happens to be a pretty good choice.

    The combination given is almost certainly exactly what powers CF!

    Harry.
     
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  4. Mitzs
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    Mitzs Ducktape Goddess

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    I understand that, and yes am doing this for bulding up my skills and learning more. But I thought that php and mysql were about the same thing, and could not understand why I would need both.

    Here is another question. You would only need the web sever if you were going to host it right? If someone was going to use go daddy or something else, I would not need to use the websever would I, to build this blog?
     
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  5. hbroomhall

    hbroomhall Petabyte Poster Gold Member

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    If you were going to host it elsewhere your would actualy need none of them, (as long as the hosting site had them!). You *could* develop it on the hosting site. But I wouldn't recomend this. :p

    If you develop it on your own machine then you need all of them - including the web-server, as otherwise how would you test it as you build it?

    Harry.
     
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  6. dmarsh
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    dmarsh Petabyte Poster

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    You are basically proposing using the LAMP stack minus Linux on Windows. This is a perfectly workable solution as all the other products work fine on Windows.

    As Harry has said a Blog is normally a starter app many people write, as such theres litterally millions of them out there to use/re-use. As for the purpose of the elements in the stack you need to understand basic design/architecture. If you look at the three tier model you will get a better understanding. Generally its Presentation-Business Logic-Resource, The presentation is your interface or UI, not always a UI as theres Web Services RPC etc. The business layer is where the main processing occurs and models your business domain, the resource layer included storage/persistence to maintain state over time, as well as connections to other systems. Theres many books about by likes of Wrox and Apress with a step by step guide on how to build a blogging app, also alot of open source which you can read through the source.

    The latest version of IIS is supposed to be alot better than previous versions, I guess only time will tell ! You generally should pick an entire stack though (as you have done!) as this will make things easier. So IIS would really mean .Net and possibly SQL Server.

    Hosting varies, basically you are renting server space, If you're on shared infrastructure things are cheaper but you have to conform to their stack.
     
  7. ffreeloader

    ffreeloader Terabyte Poster

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    Mitz,

    There are some pre-built "LAMP" stack solutions for Windows. WAMP is one, XAMPP is another. What you have to be very careful about with these all-in-one solutions is that they come with every possible configuration option enabled. That makes them sieves as far as security is concerned. They are great for learning to develop on, but not so great for production unless you spend the time to learn how to lock them down.
     
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  8. Mitzs
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    Mitzs Ducktape Goddess

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    Thanks everyone I appreciate all the input.:)
     
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  9. tripwire45
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    tripwire45 Zettabyte Poster

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    XAMPP is quite good and easy to use but as Freddy said, all of the options are enabled by default, so watch the configuration.
     
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