Datasheet

Book VIII
Chapter 1
Managing Your
Servers
871
Understanding Clients and Servers
Notepad++ for Windows and prefer VI or Emacs for other operating
systems.
✦ Integrated Development Environment: Komodo Edit and Aptana Studio
are specialized text editors with added features for Web programming.
They understand all the main Web languages and have syntax help,
code coloring, and preview features. Using one of these tools can be
extremely helpful (both are free.)
For client-side development, you don’t necessarily need access to a server.
You can test all your programs directly on your own machine with no other
preparation. Of course, you’ll eventually want a server so that you can show
your pages to everyone.
The client-side development tools listed here are described in more detail in
Book I, Chapter 3.
Parts of a server-side system
When you start working on the server side (with PHP, MySQL, and AJAX),
you need a somewhat more complex setup. In addition to everything you
need for client-side development, you also need these items:
✦ A Web server: This piece of software allows users to request Web pages
from your machine. You must either sign on to a hosting service and
use its server or install your own. (I show you both techniques in this
chapter.) By far the most common server in use is Apache. Web server
software usually runs all the time in the background because you never
know when a request will come in.
✦ A server-side language: Various languages can be connected to Web
servers to allow server-side functionality. PHP is the language I chose
in this book because it has an excellent combination of power, speed,
price (free), and functionality. PHP needs to be installed on the server
machine, and the Web server has to be configured to recognize it. See
Book VI, Chapter 1 for a review of other server-side languages.
✦ A data server: Many of your programs work with data, and they need
some sort of application to deal with that data. The most common data
server in the open-source world is MySQL. This data package is free,
powerful, and flexible. The data server is also running in the background
all the time. You have to configure PHP to know that it has access to
MySQL.
✦ A mail server: If your programs send and receive e-mail, you need some
sort of e-mail server. The most popular e-mail server in the Windows
world is Mercury Mail, and Sendmail is popular in the world of Unix and
Linux. You probably won’t bother with this item on a home server, but
you should know about it when you’re using a remote host.
53_9780470537558-bk08ch01.indd 87153_9780470537558-bk08ch01.indd 871 10/7/10 8:58 PM10/7/10 8:58 PM