How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL 354
How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL | |
author | Vikram Vaswani |
pages | 381 |
publisher | McGraw-Hill/Osborne |
rating | 7 |
reviewer | Michael J. Ross |
ISBN | 0072257954 |
summary | A tutorial on PHP and MySQL, geared to the new developer. |
The publisher has a page on their Web site devoted to the book; for some reason, it lists the book as containing 400 pages, but my copy has 381. The page also has links to a table of contents and a sample chapter, namely the first one. For those readers with very slow Internet access or unstable Adobe Acrobat plug-ins installed, be aware that the sample chapter -- and even the table of contents -- are offered only as PDFs, but the two links give no warning.
Most technical publishers, for every one of their books, wisely have links to the errata and sample code, right there on each book's Web page. This is the best approach, because when readers are having difficulty getting a book's examples to work correctly, they want to be able to quickly find and download the most up-to-date sample code, as well as check the errata page for any bugs in the printed code. Unfortunately, McGraw-Hill/Osborne has their links to those two types of information in an easily-overlooked part of a menubar, using small black text on a blue background. The links are near the upper left-hand corner, and outside the content section of the Web page, where the typical reader would be seeking fruitlessly for them.
The companion Web site for the book is hosted by Vaswani's software consulting firm, Melonfire. The site has the book's table of contents (in HTML), a link to chapter 1 in PDF, a profile of the author, three full-length case studies, a feedback form, and an extensive collection of links to PHP and MySQL reference material, discussion lists, articles, and tutorials. At the end of the Introduction in the book, the author invites the reader to use that companion site for connecting with other PHP users, and sharing their thoughts on PHP and MySQL development. The site itself has no such forum, so the author probably meant the discussion lists.
The companion site also has a link to download a Zip file containing all of the sample applications from the book -- from chapters 7, 12, and 16 -- comprising nine PHP scripts, an SQL file, and a data file. The code snippets themselves do not appear to be included in the download. This shouldn't pose a difficulty for the typical reader, since few of the code snippets are long. Besides, typing them in on one's computer can help to reinforce the language syntax that one is learning, as well as decent code formatting (valuable for newbies).
The book is organized into four parts.The first of these presents the basics of PHP and MySQL, including the history and features of both technologies, as well as how to install them on Unix and Windows systems, verify the integrity of the installations, and make some critical security and configuration changes, such as changing passwords. Parts II and III cover the basics of PHP and MySQL, respectively. The fourth and final part describes how to use the two together. To that end, every chapter contains snippets of code to illustrate the ideas being described. In addition, each section is wrapped up and illustrated with a sample application. For PHP, the author shows how to build a session-based shopping cart. For MySQL, he presents a simple order-tracking system. For using PHP and MySQL together, he shows a news-publishing system.
Despite its title, the book clearly does not tell the reader how to do everything with PHP and MySQL. As the author notes in the Introduction, the book is not designed to be a complete reference for either technology, but instead intended as a tutorial for Web developers who are interested in learning how to do server-side scripting in combination with a database management system. Vaswani states that he does not assume prior knowledge of programming or database fundamentals, and that these basic concepts will be taught by example, using tutorials and realistic examples. I suspect a reader not familiar with HTML, however, could be easily baffled by the book. On the other hand, most if not all developers reading a book on PHP or MySQL are likely to already know HTML well enough to understand the output of PHP-enhanced Web pages.
One strength that this book has over many similar ones is that the author explains up front how to install PHP and MySQL, rather than relegating these topics to an appendix, or skipping them entirely. This is critical, because many programmers will find that the most challenging aspects of getting started with PHP and MySQL, are simply getting them installed and working, along with a Web server, such as Apache -- and not coding the applications themselves.
Another welcome aspect of the book is the author's enthusiasm for the technologies -- although characterizing MySQL as "quite friendly" (page 150) is a stretch. Furthermore, his explanations are clear and concise. In addition, Vaswani makes no pretense that his book has all the answers; he frequently refers the reader to URLs in the online manuals of the products, for more details. In addition, he does a nice job of illustrating the advantages of normalized database tables, and later explaining how to format query output -- an important topic omitted in many similar books.
Yet, like all books, this one is not perfect. There are a number of errors or pitfalls in the book that could confuse the reader. They range from incomplete explanations of what a user will see when running particular commands, to the sort of errata one finds in all technical books. I found over two dozen in total (there may be more). In the interests of keeping this Slashdot version of the book review close to the recommended length, I won't list all of the problems here, but will instead refer the reader to a longer version of this book review, if they are interested in those details.
Aside from its many minor flaws, I recommend this title to any programmer who wants to learn the basics of PHP and MySQL. Even though the publisher could improve their production quality, choice of binding, and Web page, the author has done a good job of clearly presenting the major points. Future editions could incorporate fixes to the errors noted in the longer version of this review, as well as better explain to the neophyte how to test/debug the code snippets. Nonetheless, the intended reader would be well served by this particular book.
Michael J. Ross is a freelance writer, computer consultant, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter. You can purchase How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
It can do everything! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It can do everything! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It can do everything! (Score:2)
An OS, emulated on APACHE!
Re:It can do everything! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Instructions: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Instructions: (Score:2)
Re:Instructions: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Instructions: (Score:2)
Re:Instructions: (Score:2)
This has to be one of those, "Step 2: ?????", "Step 3: Profit!" things...
QUIT emacs?!? (Score:2, Funny)
Comparison to Other Books? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Comparison to Other Books? (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the old saying goes (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, buy one for each one of them.
Then, when you've bought those two, you can stack them under your laptop and type in:
http://www.php.net/ [php.net]
http://mysql.com/doc/ [mysql.com]
Ready to go!
Re:Like the old saying goes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Like the old saying goes (Score:2)
Hell the php .chm is wonderful [php.net] as well.
When I started developing in php and mysql I went out and bought "Open Source Web Development with LAMP". It was recommended, and apparently was very helpful. After an hour, put it on the bookshelf and went to php.net, and haven't looked back since. Anything that is in these books I can usually figure out myself with the help files, and anything I cannot figure out myself usually isn't in the book (though there is always a web site somewhere with example code that
Re:Like the old saying goes (Score:3, Informative)
php strings
and it takes me right there, and with seven fewer keystrokes than you, making me more efficient.
Re:Like the old saying goes (Score:2)
buy a MySQL book (Score:2)
why?
php won't require lots of reference, once you learn something, you won't need to look it up. but with mysql, you will want a reference.
the other reason, once someone learns php, they will probably want to move on to another language. save the $50 from the php book and use it for a Java book.
that is if people are like me and have limited money. get the most bang for the buck. there is no reason to have a book that you use once and then don't need. it is be
No, buy a SQL book (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, buy a SQL book (Score:5, Insightful)
If people start doing that.... I can't see people still using MySQL :)
Re:No, buy a SQL book (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:buy a MySQL book (Score:3, Insightful)
I just don't care that MySQL isn't SQL-92 compliant. By the way, none of the applications I have worked on on Oracle could be trivially ported to a different db, sta
Re:Like the old saying goes (Score:2)
It's true, PHP and MySQL both ahev great doccumentation. It's very complete, the examples are well laid out and commented but to learn a language from the on screen doccumentation?
I like to be able to lie with a book in bed, in the garden, on the bus, all the places I don't really want to be with a laptop.
When you're physically coding at the keyboard the online doccumentation is often the fastest way to look up a query, but you can really get a feel for something by
Re:Like the old saying goes (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm big on books for learning and reference. I like to read, and I like to read on paper. I almost always prefer to grab something from my bookshelf and flip through the index than dig through a website. And I really want to emphasize that the PHP site is not, not, not a good way to learn the language. It's great when you want to find out why something doesn't work as documented (it's probably in the reader comments), but it is entirely useless as a way to learn how to effectively use the language.
And that's ok - that's not it's intent. All of this "you don't need a book, just go to php.net!" is really doing a disservice to those new to the language, or those that would like to actually learn good programming technique. Regarding the latter, the reader comments are generally abysmal and show the ignorance common in a (relatively) young community. For those just starting out, random access to > 3000 functions is not useful. At all.
With that little rant out of the way, I'd love a recommendation for a PHP book similar to Thinking in Java, or Advanced Perl Programming. I've looked, but all I've found are Dick and Jane Learn PHP, or dead tree dumps of the documentation.
I prefer a different book (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I prefer a different book (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I prefer a different book (Score:2, Insightful)
We should author that book.
MySQL has garnered such popularity because it is EASY. It is unfortunate however that easy does not mean good. MySQL is the Geo Metro of database systems. It's easy to drive and anyone can finance the thing. It pays to note that LAMP is the ultimate driving force behind the movement.
As a result of this ease and the lack of knowledge needed to make it operational, there are more scripts than one can count that you just drop into a LAMP installation and *bing*, instant website.
haha (Score:3, Funny)
He flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions.
One size doesn't fit everything (Score:5, Informative)
1. No proper database connection pooling (and no, pconnect is not connection pooling).
2. Can't really run Apache2 in its threaded mode because a lot of php libraries are not thread safe (although php itself is).
Don't get me wrong, I *love* both php and mysql, but for highly-trafficked sites, jsp is definitely a better choice (from my own experience).
Re:One size doesn't fit everything (Score:3, Informative)
No proper database connection pooling (and no, pconnect is not connection pooling).
Huh? What is it, then?
Can't really run Apache2 in its threaded mode because a lot of php libraries are not thread safe (although php itself is).
Clearly only a problem if you're using those php libraries that aren't thread safe, and even then, the performance increase of threaded apache usually isn't worth the additional programming overhead of dealing with threads - and if you really need to squeeze every ounce out of
Hmm, sounds like the J2EE guy (Score:3, Interesting)
By the way, some yahoo [radwin.org] is using PHP for one of the most highly trafficked sites in the world, how about that?
Versions (Score:3, Interesting)
Which Version of mySQL does this book apply to?
Specifically, does it cover PHP5?
Re:Versions (Score:3, Informative)
Most comments to this review (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is sad, because as much as PHP sucks [blogspot.com], J2EE solutions suck just as badly in different ways. (That's another article.)
You forgot... (Score:2)
Oh yeah...
MySQL sucks. Not a real RDBMS. Very limited. Not ACID compliant. blah, blah, blah.
Re:You forgot... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You forgot... (Score:5, Informative)
PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and many other database systems (including commercial and open source) have been ACID compliant for quite some time. Not to mention the abundance of features that other database systems have, like stored procedures, triggers, views, subselects, etc. Many of those features have not yet made their way into MySQL and may not until 5.1; some have been recently added to production releases; others are still in "5.0" beta.
Even then, data integrity and features have never been a primary concern of MySQL developers.
Access manages to beat MySQL; MySQL completely chokes (for whatever reason) on joins that Access handles in seconds. SQL Server, PostgreSQL handle these queries fine.
Re:You forgot... (Score:5, Interesting)
Worse than that, if the table type isn't available and you try to use it, MySQL doesn't fail. It'll happily go on, ignoring that you asked for InnoDB tables with ACID compliance, and pretend that it's actually doing something when you ask it to open/commit/rollback a transaction. This is one of those "user friendly" features that really isn't, and MySQL has a bad habit of doing crap like this. If I want a table of a certain type, and that type isn't available, the DDL should cause a failure. It shouldn't succeed silently, choosing a different table type than what I asked for.
Don't forget, implementing those features will make MySQL slow! Real programmers don't need them! Well, not until MySQL implements them, anyway (wait, I thought implementing them would make MySQL slow? They's gots some kind of magic that can keep MySQL fast after implementing features that'll make it slow? Well hot damn!).
Features come and go, and I have no doubt that the MySQL developers will continue to advance MySQL until it can effectively mimic a real RDBMS. The lack of features is just an additional reason to complain about MySQL. The real reason why Those Who Know Better (tm) give them so much shit is the developers' attitudes, that they think they know so much more than development houses that have spent 20+ years researching and building real RDBMS engines (Oracle, IBM, and even Microsoft). If MySQL developers would've just said something along the lines of, "We understand the importance of foreign keys for proper referential integrity enforcement, but we have other priorities right now and want to make sure that when we do implement foreign keys that we do so in a robust and performant way," I wouldn't have ever had a problem with MySQL lacking foreign key support (just used as an example). Instead, they had an attitude like, "You don't need foreign keys. If we implemented them, they'd slow down MySQL, and besides, if you're a good enough developer you can compensate for the lack of foreign keys in your application code." That attitude earned them the scorn and distrust of anybody who knows anything about RDBMS design and usage.
Re:Most comments to this review (Score:3, Funny)
will be either "wooo! php rocks!" or "php sucks, use a Real Man's language like java."
Or "Ruby on Rails is 202% Better!!!111!"
I don't know how to use RoR but all the trendy powerbooks people are using it so it's got to be cool.
Re:Most comments to this review (Score:2)
This is wildly unfair to both technologies.
PHP can suck in some ways. J2EE can suck in others.
However, what critics of J2EE often forget is that J2EE can be used in a very light manner. Major applications have been written using only JSP pages, possibly using a rich set of tag libraries. This allows development of scripted pages in a very similar manner to PHP, but with the abilit
"JSP in a very light manner" (Score:2)
Invariably people who sing the JSP praises have no significant experience with a real lightweight toolkit (Spyce, CherryPy, RoR,
But that's okay, because doing things the hard way builds testosterone.
Re:"JSP in a very light manner" (Score:4, Insightful)
It certainly has. Especially in terms of performance. The latest Tomcat (5.5) approaches the speed of Apache in some cases.
Yes, you could run Tomcat on port 80, with no Apache, but I seem to recall that Tomcat specifically leaves out much of the functionality that Apache does natively- perhaps lock something down by IP, etc.
This is all available now (RemoteHostValve, RemoteAddrValve etc).
Once you've gone through the nightmare of setting this up properly, you then get to learn Ant to make your WARs. While I did find Ant appealing/nice/whatever, it's quite a bit more complex than you're making it up to be to be serving up
The latest versions of NetBeans (4.0, 4.1) does this for you. Every change to a J2EE project automatically updates your WAR file. It even (again automatically) writes and maintains Ant scripts so that you can do this from the command line as well.
I do feel a lot of the criticism of Java/JSP/J2EE is based on the way things were years ago. This have changed a lot!
Just now emerging, in 2005? (Score:4, Funny)
Didn't PHP / MySQL emerge as a favorite about 5 years ago? Isn't the pair now a fully emerged favorite? Did I dream the year 2000 or has the author been Rip Van Winkling?
Re:Just now emerging, in 2005? (Score:2)
Maybe he's been too busy verbing proper nouns to notice.
PHP and MySQL (Score:2, Funny)
Re:PHP and MySQL (Score:2)
Make it stop (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like the only explanation for this myriad of redundant books on such a simple topic. Really, how can there be a market that can accomodate another one of these identical books every month?
Re:Make it stop (Score:2)
Beats me, but I would be satisfied with just one good PHP book that dealt with some more advanced topics. Something like "Design Patterns in PHP", or "How to Architect a PHP Web Application That Isn't 5 Thousand Unmaintainable Spaghetti Files."
I've been doing web app development almost exclusively with PHP for the last four years. I pretty much hate the language, but there are a lot of solid, pragmatic reasons to use it. The funny thing is, almost all of the "PHP suxor!" posts that I see here would be eas
Re:Make it stop (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate the title (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate how people abuses of PHP. PHP is nice when you really need what things like PHP/ASP/etc provide, but these days some people use it for everything. I hate it. Take a look at blogs - they're not really "dynamic content", they're just static content which changes very frequently, still everybody uses PHP to implement them.
Re:I hate the title (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't that make it dynamic?
ANd why not use PHP to implement them? Instead of ftping the file tomy computer, adding my new text, then ftping it back, I can just use a PHP script to add it to a db, and a second script to write it out to the world. Much easier. As someone who did things the bad old way once upon a time, this is a huge time saver.
Re:I hate the title (Score:3, Informative)
ANd why not use PHP to implement them?
It's unnecessary, that's all. A text or HTML editor with FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV can do the job just as well. And for sites that actually get traffic, it's best to minimize the amount of database hits and processing required to display a page.
Just because you *can* is not a reason why you *should*. (Now if only I'd
Just Another Book... (Score:2)
Melonfire (Score:4, Funny)
The companion Web site for the book is hosted by Vaswani's software consulting firm, Melonfire.
Do I really want to read a book by someone who works for a consulting firm named after the ignition of fruit?If everything you have is a hammer... (Score:2)
- Hubert
Brilliant! (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, this book is just indicative of one of the key features of the Open Source movement: the ability to take two bad software packages and combine them to form something truely horrific.
(I wasn't using that Karma anyway.)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perl and PostgreSQL (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Perl and PostgreSQL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perl and PostgreSQL (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perl and PostgreSQL (Score:5, Interesting)
If that is for historical reason you are smart. PostgreSQL has always been a better database than MySQL. Perl is the old standby for web development. However today Ruby and Python have both proven themselves better languages, in that you have a good chance of reading and understanding your code latter when you need to maintain it. Therefore I have to suggest you evaluate them both, and choose one for jobs that don't have historical reasons to use perl.
Don't waste your time on PHP. It is better than Perl, but not by enough to be worth the pain.
PHP editorfor Linux, anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
If anyone can point me to a good *free* PHP editor for Linux, I'd be very glad. The editors for Linux I find here http://www.php-editors.com/review/ [php-editors.com], are not good enough. I want one I can get for free.
Re:PHP editorfor Linux, anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PHP editorfor Linux, anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
I use vim, but make sure you set ctags up.
[OT] Re:PHP editorfor Linux, anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
Kate
Has syntax highlighting (including recoginizing builtin functions), bracket matching, code folding, regex search and replace, blah blah.
If you want one that does fancier stuff like show you class structures etc, then I dunno. Eclipse has a PHP plugin I heard - dunno how it works. One of my friends is huge into zend studio (non-free), but he works at a university (where they think nothing of spending a students tuititions
Re:PHP editorfor Linux, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Invaluable and the CVS integration makes it even better.
I run it on (seriously) on Windows (Work), Linux (Home), Mac (Laptop) and don't skip a beat.
Great Book! (Score:5, Funny)
Risk of SQL injection (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the examples given in the companion web site. There is code like the following, which is highly vulnerable to SQL injection [wikipedia.org] attacks:
Validate? Just by removing trailing spaces? People trusting this book's advice will be very sorry soon.
One more example:
No validation at all! User input thrown into the database without any check!
It's unbelievable that in 2005, after all the outrage and cry about SQL injection ther is still a new book proposing such horrible code!
Re:Risk of SQL injection (Score:3, Informative)
This [owasp.org] can be useful for you.
Re:bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, PHP lends itself to sloppier code than some other languages. Or rather, it _allows_ you to write sloppy code. But this is only a disadvantage if the developer is unskilled/undisciplined. A skilled PHP programmer can write robust, object-oriented code that follows the same design patterns as Java. It's just that certain Java frameworks force every project to be heavyweight, while PHP allows you to do a lot of things simply. If you want to write yourself a simple photo gallery app, why bother with Struts?
I write this as an ex- (not current) PHP programmer. I recently made the switch to Ruby on Rails, which has proved to be fantastic thus far.
Never trust anyone who says "Language X is terrible and Language Y is great."
Re:bah! (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't quite true. A good example is that many very-high load Java websites use application-scoped caching of data. This is very hard to do elegantly in PHP.
Java was designed to be object-oriented from the start. With PHP, it was an afterthought.
It's just that certain Java frameworks force every project to be heavyweight, while PHP allows you to do a lot of things simply. If you want to wr
Re:bah! (Score:2)
And if you want spaghetti code, both PHP and JSP are happy to help.
This doesn't mean (contra the AC above) that PHP is a toy language.
Re:bah! (Score:2)
And this captures it in a nutshell. Ease of use (even sloppy use), documented examples, price, and saturation is 9/10's of the battle...And PHP has claimed all of those crowns.
PHP encourages bad code. (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, the PHP developers have proven over and over again that they do not care AT ALL about security. As an ex-PHP programmer myself, I have to agree with the "dear god use anything but PHP" people.
Re:bah! (Score:2)
Re:bah! (Score:2)
Re:bah! (Score:2)
There are certainly places where oracle is the right tool for the job, but I can't think of any case where postgres would be the best choice, mysql-bashing, anonymous coward postgres bigots notwithstanding
PHP not a true language? (Score:2)
Re:MySQL good, PHP not so good (Score:2, Informative)
Also, you must not have explored PHP much if you don't think any large applications exist.
Re:MySQL good, PHP not so good (Score:2)
And what's this business about scripting languages not being true languages?
It was the language and not the code? (Score:4, Insightful)
PHP websites are more vulnerable to worms. Just six months ago, many PHP run forums were shut down and destroyed. The exploit was something that worked only with PHP forums.
So it was a shortcoming endemic to the langauge, and not sloppy coding, right? I mean to say, PHP itself was at fault, due its very nature? A similar thing can't possibly happen in a "real" programming language like Java?
Java is the better language to learn. It is more like a true programming language than PHP. The reward for the time spent learning a language is greater with Java than with PHP.
That's begging the question [skepdic.com]. And wooly-headed thinking at its best. I'd argue that the barrier to entry is a lot lower with PHP than Java (or C, C++, .Net, et al.). So someone new to the language is bound to see results faster. But your point is nonsensical to begin with...
I always thought of PHP as more of a scripting langugae, and not a true language. No large PHP applications exists out there. But there are tons of enterprise Java applications.
A scripting language is a "true language". BASIC is a true programming langauge. MSDOS batch is a true programming langauge. Further, have you ever heard the saying "use the right tool for the job"? There are a lot of types of websites filling a lot of roles. Many (most?) of them don't need the overhead and complexity of an enterprise-class system. Use what works, without specious limitations brought on by technical snobbery.
-B
Re:MySQL good, PHP not so good (Score:2)
I don't think PHP sites are inherently more vulnerable because they use PHP. I think it's because PHP coders are more likely to be amateurs, and PHP projects more likely to be developed by new coders, that they'd have holes. It's not a failure of PHP IMHO. It just happens that more bad coders use PHP.
Re:MySQL good, PHP not so good (Score:2)
Bingo. No language can make up for bad coding. PHP happens to be a) ubiquitous, b) easy to get started with, leading to c) lots of crap code. PHP can be criticized for a lot of things, but the ability of those that use it isn't one of them. (Although maybe we can lay a bit of blame at the feet of publishers that won't put out a book that talks about applying good programming practices to PHP? We have more "Dick and Jane Learn PHP" books than we know what to do with already.)
Re:MySQL good, PHP not so good (Score:3, Insightful)
If this is the worm I am thinking about, it was specific to one particular forum, which is quite popular and written in PHP. The exploit was a vulnerability in the source, not PHP itself. Is all JSP code automatically uber-secure?
And if the 'reward' of programming with a 'real' programming language is that much better, write your web-apps in C, or ::shudders:: Assembly... For now, I'll use the tool that is best suited for the job based on it's merits and my abili
Re:MySQL good, PHP not so good (Score:2)
Saying that there was a worm that only affected PHP forums is only a half-truth, at best. It only affected a single PHP based forum, not every PHP forum made in existance. The flaw there was a hole in the software, NOT a hole in PHP. Have there been holes in PHP? Of course, there's hole in everything else, too. The exploit was not in PHP, it was in some software that's coded in PHP. Using your thinki
Re:MySQL good, PHP not so good (Score:2)
The performance of Java and the functionality of MySQL. There's a match made in hell for ya.
Seriously, do their problem domains overlap at all? Big servers with plenty of resources: Java + an ACID database. Small servers that want to be responsive at the expense of all else (like complex functionality and data integrity): PHP + MySQL. I can't imagine harnessing DB2 to PHP, and the inverse doesn't seem a whole lot more sane.
I know someone's going to pipe up and anno
Re:both available under open-source licenses? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:both available under open-source licenses? (Score:2)
Dammit, I'm going to get my money worth!
Re:both available under open-source licenses? (Score:2)
Re:both available under open-source licenses? (Score:2)
Re:both available under open-source licenses? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:both available under open-source licenses? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not very free IMHO.
Re:both available under open-source licenses? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is not one thing that you can do under the GPL that you are not allowed to do under the BSD license, and there is quite a bit more you can do under BSD.
That is pretty much the definition of "more free" under any definition of "free" that applies to this disucssion (e.g. is not the same as "gratis").
Now, the questions of whether the BSD license or GPL leads to more software freedom and which license promotes free software better are up for some debate. The GPL makes sure th
Not entirely correct (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, it is a toy database, and as such, should not be used on serious projects (i.e., anything that uses normalized data schemas and requires data integrity).
Re:Not entirely correct (Score:2)
The second paragraph reads:
When your application is not licensed under either the GPL-compatible Free Software License as defined by the Free Software Foundation or approved by OSI, and you intend to or you may distribute MySQL software, you must first obtain a commercial license to the MySQL product.
(emphasis mine)
Sheesh. I expect better from someone with a 5-digit UID.
Simple Answer (Score:2)
Re:Really?! (Score:2)
Darn marketing double-speak, gets you every time!
It is awesome how many
Re:change of minds ? (Score:2)
On a smaller level I really don't like CFML because it doesn't feel consistent; it's not a scripting language in the way that PHP is, and so every step has to be in its own tag, and sometimes because HTML and
Re:Is that Realistic? (Score:3, Informative)