A Sample Program

Now that we have a web server and PHP installed, the next step is to install Symfony2 and NetBeans. However, I decided to take an excursion here and familiarize myself a little bit with the syntax of PHP. For this purpose, instead of digging through books or tutorials, I will work on simple exercises to learn the workings of this language.

Here is the first program that I will be working on:

Write a program which receives input from 10 drop-down lists, where the possible values are integers between 0 and 9, inclusive. The values should be stored in an indexed array. After the numbers are collected from the user, the contents of the array should be displayed on a new page and the user should be presented with a choice between sorting the values, calculating the average of the values or starting over.

I will give a step by step explanation of the program as I write it.

Installing PHP

Having installed a web server, the next order of business is to install PHP to our system. This post includes step by step instructions on how to install PHP on a Windows 7 system. If you haven't installed a web server yet, then see the previous post.

Installing IIS 7

Unlike HTML, web pages written in PHP can't be displayed by web browsers directly; they have to pass through what is called a web server and be interpreted. The first step of writing PHP programs is to install and configure a web server.

Introduction

In the past, all one needed to know in order to develop web pages was HTML; but we are long past that stage. Now, almost all web sites with notable functionality has some sort of dynamic content. There are many choices for creating dynamic web pages such as ASP, JPS and PHP. After looking into JSP for some time, I decided for various reasons that starting over with PHP will be better suited for my needs. This blog will be where I keep everything that I know about the PHP language and related applications.

My current level of knowledge about PHP is close to zero but I am not a complete beginner about programming. I know how to program in Java (which is the reason I looked into JSP first) and I have fair knowledge about HTML, CSS and computers in general. I plan to use the Symfony2 framework and NetBeans IDE in this venture. In my next posts, I will write about installation of PHP, IIS and NetBeans for Windows 7. Instructions for Linux (Ubuntu) will follow shortly after.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions. Happy programming!