Introducción a la Ingeniería del Software y a los Sistemas de Información

Laboratory: XAMP and APTANA February 2013

Goal of the practice

1.- Introduction to

In this course, we are going to use:

- Apache - PHP installed as a module for Apache

It is possible to download all those applications and to install them independently. However, this process takes time and it is prone to errors. That is why we use XAMPP.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and together with other components such as ftp servers, mail servers, OpenSSL,… As a matter of fact, the name of XAMPP stands for X (for all the operating systems) Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start. XAMPP is free of charge and most of its components are open source.

XAMPP can be downloaded from: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. In that web you can also find installation instructions for Windows, MacOS and Linux. You must have privileged access to install and configure XAMPP, otherwise there will be errors during the installation.

After the installation, all XAMPP services are managed in the XAMPP Control Panel Application, which can be started by executing xampp-control.exe:

Figure 1: XAMPP Control Panel

From this control panel, the main modules (such as Apache) can be started and stopped. Additionally, it also allows configuring these modules as services (enabling “SVC” in the left), which are automatically started when the system boots.

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Introducción a la Ingeniería del Software y a los Sistemas de Información

Laboratory: XAMP and APTANA February 2013

2.- Exercises with XAMPP and Apache

a. Check that XAMPP is installed on your system by opening the XAMPP Control Panel. Make sure Apache is running and start it otherwise.

b. Open the default web page in http://localhost and browse the information on these pages. Specially interesting are the web pages with information about the PHP (phpinfo()), the management tools of MySQL (phpMyAdmin) and the server activity monitoring (Webalizer).

c. Check what happens if you stop Apache and, then, try to open http://localhost again in the web browser.

d. Create a folder inside the Apache web directory. Copy some files into that folder and try to access to this file through the web browser.

Figure 2: XAMPP management web site

3.- Introduction to

Aptana is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) to support the development of web applications. Aptana includes support for HTML,XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM, PHP and several other languages by means of plugins. It can be downloaded from http://aptana.com

The main features of Aptana for web development are:

- Coloured syntax for the aforementioned file types. - Autocomplete of code and tags. - Code validation and unified notification of errors. - Integrated support to several JavaScript AJAX libraries.

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Introducción a la Ingeniería del Software y a los Sistemas de Información

Laboratory: XAMP and APTANA February 2013

The main window in Aptana is as follows:

Figure 3: Aptana framework

Aptana uses the concept of project. A project is a container that is used by the IDE to group related files and folders. Typically projects group html, css, js and files of a single web site.

To create a new project in aptana, select File – New – Project, and a wizard will guide you through the process.

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Introducción a la Ingeniería del Software y a los Sistemas de Información

Laboratory: XAMP and APTANA February 2013

4.- Exercices with Aptana

a. Create a new web Project.

Figure 4: Steps to create a New Web Project with Aptana

b. Create in the project a new web page with the main tags and the text “Hello World”. Display it in the web browser.

Figure 5: Generating a basic web page with Aptana

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