Building a Web Application with PHP and MariaDB: A Reference Guide Build fast, secure, and interactive web applications using this comprehensive guide Sai Srinivas Sriparasa BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI Building a Web Application with PHP and MariaDB: A Reference Guide Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: June 2014 Production Reference: 1090614 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK. ISBN 978-1-78398-162-5 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by Artie Ng ([email protected]) Credits Author Project Coordinator Sai Srinivas Sriparasa Sageer Parkar Reviewers Proofreaders Dario Grd Simran Bhogal Nikolai Lifanov Stephen Copestake Esteban De La Fuente Rubio Indexers Commissioning Editor Hemangini Bari Kunal Parikh Mariammal Chettiyar Mehreen Deshmukh Acquisition Editor Tejal Soni Mohammad Rizvi Production Coordinator Content Development Editor Nitesh Thakur Shaon Basu Cover Work Technical Editors Nitesh Thakur Mrunmayee Patil Aman Preet Singh Copy Editors Janbal Dharmaraj Sayanee Mukherjee About the Author Sai Srinivas Sriparasa is a web developer and an open-source evangelist living in the Atlanta area. He was the lead developer for building Dr. Oz's website and currently works on predictive analysis algorithms for News Distribution Network (NDN). He has previously led teams for companies such as Sprint Nextel, West Interactive, Apple, and SAC Capital. His repertoire includes PHP, Python, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Hadoop, JavaScript, HTML5, Responsive Web Development, ASP.NET, C#, Silverlight, and so on. He has worked on books such as JavaScript and JSON Essentials, Packt Publishing. I want to convey my sincere thanks to the team at Packt Publishing for making this book possible: Shaon, Sageer, and Sumeet in particular. This is my second book, so I want to thank all of the readers in advance for taking time to read my book. Please contact me on my LinkedIn profile,http://www.linkedin.com/in/ saisriparasa, for networking or any questions that you have. My acknowledgement section will not be complete unless I thank my mom, dad, and my sister for all their patience and support throughout my life. I hope you all enjoy this book as much as I did and wish me luck for my next book. About the Reviewers Dario Grd is a web developer with 7 years of experience in various technologies. He works with programming languages such as PHP, Java, Groovy, and .NET. He loves working with frameworks such as Symfony, Grails, jQuery, and Bootstrap. He finished his master's degree in Informatics at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics, University of Zagreb. After getting the degree, he started working as a programmer at a company specialized in developing banking information systems, where he became a web team leader. Currently, he is working at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics as an expert assistant in Higher Education and Science System at Application Development Centre. He works on various European and freelance projects. He developed a new Content Management System (CMS) from scratch and is very proud of it. Other than programming, he is also interested in web server administration and is currently managing a hosting server. When he is not working, you can find him on the soccer field or playing table tennis. He plays futsal for a local team and competes in an amateur table tennis league. You can follow him at http://dario-grd.iz.hr/en. Nikolai Lifanov hacks systems. This means doing things that aren't meant to be done to create a useful effect in a hurry. Over the last decade, he has had experience in everything from running HA infrastructures on donated prefail hardware to dealing with emergency spikes in service demand by padding the infrastructure with cloud services within hours. He had roles ranging from that of a full-stack engineer to a developer, but feels most in his element focusing on essential system infrastructure. He builds robust and observable systems that are hard to break and easy to fix with a strong focus on self-healing, security, and reducing essential ongoing maintenance. He has built solutions from Linux and BSD systems, from creating immutable live cd NetBSD hypervisors (a la SmartOS) to founding a hosting business based on DragonFly. He tries to be active in the open source community and enjoys old-school roguelike games. His hobbies include researching obscure ancient arcane Unix lore and retro computing. Esteban De La Fuente Rubio is a programmer with experience mainly in the PHP language. He worked in his earlier years developing small websites and by now, 10 years later, he is the author of the SowerPHP framework on GitHub. In the last 6 years, he has worked for various Chilean companies developing software for supporting their process. He also contributed to the free software community developing small applications and tools to make life easier (more details on this can be found at his GitHub account, namely, https://github.com/estebandelaf). www.PacktPub.com Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more You might want to visit www.PacktPub.com for support files and downloads related to your book. Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? 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Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter 1: CRUD Operations, Sorting, Filtering, and Joins 7 String datatypes 9 Number datatypes 10 Date datatypes 11 The students table 15 The courses table 17 The students_courses table 18 Inserting data 19 Retrieving data 23 Sorting data 24 Filtering data 26 Updating data 29 Deleting data 29 Joins 30 Summary 33 Chapter 2: Advanced Programming with MariaDB 35 Enhancing the existing tables 35 Working with stored procedures 43 Working with stored routines 51 Working with triggers 53 Summary 59 Chapter 3: Advanced Programming with PHP 61 New features in PHP 5.4 and 5.5 61 Updated array declaration 62 The array dereferencing function 63 The list() function in the foreach statement 64 Table of Contents Availability of $this in closures 66 Class member access on instantiation 67 Generators 69 Traits 71 Addition of the finally block to exception handling 73 Unit testing 75 Installing PHPUnit 76 Working with MariaDB 80 PHP – mysqli 81 PHP – PDO 83 Summary 86 Chapter 4: Setting Up Student Portal 87 Setting up the nuts and bolts of our application 88 Setting up URL rewrite 88 Setting up MVC 91 Adding a student 96 Listing all students 100 Adding a course 102 Listing all courses 105 Registering a student to a course 106 Viewing all registrations 109 Summary 112 Chapter 5: Working with Files and Directories 113 Data imports 113 Data exports 118 Logging 119 Summary 122 Chapter 6: Authentication and Access Control 123 Authentication 123 Access controls 130 User roles 134 Summary 138 Chapter 7: Caching 139 Introduction to caching 139 Caching in the database 140 Caching in the application 144 Advanced caching techniques 146 Summary 147 [ ii ] Table of Contents Chapter 8: REST API 149 What is REST? 149 Generating XML feeds 153 Generating JSON feeds 154 Summary 155 Chapter 9: Security 157 Securing the Apache web server 157 Hiding server information 158 Server configuration limits 159 Securing MariaDB 160 Password-protected access 161 Building views to restrict access 161 Creating users and granting access 162 Securing PHP 164 Summary 165 Chapter 10: Performance Optimization 167 Performance optimization for the Apache web server 168 Disabling unused modules 168 Using compression 170 Caching 171 Performance optimization for MariaDB 171 Best practices for data retrieval 172 Understanding query execution 173 Query optimization and indexing 173 Performance optimization for PHP 175 CDN, reverse proxy, and database replication 176 Summary 177 Index 179 [ iii ] Preface In the age of the Internet, building a web application is no longer a tough task, but building the web application in the right way is not a trait mastered by many.