Specifications

INTRODUCTION
The home page for PHP is available at http://www.php.net
The home page for Zend is at http://www.zend.com
What’s New In PHP Version 4?
If you have used PHP before, you will notice a few important improvements in version 4. In this
new version
• PHP 4 is much faster than previous versions because it uses the new Zend Engine. If you
need even higher performance, you can obtain the Zend Optimizer, Zend Cache, or Zend
Compiler from http://www.zend.com.
• You have always been able to use PHP as an efficient module for the Apache server. With
this new version, you can install PHP as an ISAPI module for Microsoft’s Internet
Information Server.
• Session support is now built in. In previous versions, you needed to install the PHPlib add-
on for session control or write your own.
What Is MySQL?
MySQL (pronounced My-Ess-Que-Ell) is a very fast, robust, relational database management sys-
tem (RDBMS). A database enables you to efficiently store, search, sort, and retrieve data. The
MySQL server controls access to your data to ensure that multiple users can work with it concur-
rently, to provide fast access to it, and ensure that only authorized users can obtain access. Hence,
MySQL is a multi-user, multi-threaded server. It uses SQL (Structured Query Language), the stan-
dard database query language worldwide. MySQL has been publicly available since 1996, but has
a development history going back to 1979. It has now won the Linux Journal Readers’ Choice
Award three years running.
MySQL is now available under an Open Source license, but commercial licenses are also available
if required.
Why Use PHP and MySQL?
When setting out to build an e-commerce site, there are many different products that you could use.
You will need to choose hardware for the Web server, an operating system, Web server software, a
database management system, and a programming or scripting language.
Some of these choices will be dependent on the others. For example, not all operating systems will
run on all hardware, not all scripting languages can connect to all databases, and so on.
In this book, we do not pay much attention to your hardware, operating system, or Web server
software. We don’t need to. One of the nice features of PHP is that it is available for Microsoft
Windows, for many versions of UNIX, and with any fully-functional Web server. MySQL is
similarly versatile.
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