Re: Tools and Techniques

[Ray McCord <ray.mccord@gmail.com>]

Not to be deliberately vague (most of my form validation experience
was gained through countless hours of trial and error, on my own, with
few tutorials), I would point out http://www.phpbuilder.com/ as a good
resource for locating (if not on that site, then pointers to)
tutorials, sample code, and whatnot for form validation, pretty-print
forms and the like. I have also found quite a bit of off-hand links
digging around in the annotated online version of the PHP Manual (at
http://www.php.net/manual/ ).

Now, for a few general pointers. If you are serious about
cross-platform development, you will want to get good and acquainted
with at least the following:
 
+ basic CGI environment of Apache 2 (ENV vars, mod_rewrite, etc.) --
this will make your life easier when writing dynamic applications and
mission critical websites (like IE, Apache has the lions share of its
domain -- Web servers)

+ beef up your PHP skills, the best way being to sketch out a simple
(SIMPLE!) CMS that accepts form input (GET/POST) and slaps the right
content into a template (simple masthead and footer arrangement). You
will gain so much insight from this exercise, so much more than any
step-by-step tutorial (plus, some people cannot learn from
hand-holding tutorials, but must get in neck-deep, I am one of these
people ;).

+ learn, if you have not already done so, PCRE (Perl-compatible
regular expressions). This is the equivalent of telling Einstein to
learn physics. If you don't know 'regex', the Perl way, you will find
yourself stumped when reading other people's code, plus you will be
very disadvantaged, generally, in the field.

+ the L.A.M.P. platform is good. The browser on the other end need not
care what your application runs on. HOWEVER, and there is always a
however in life ;). You will find that Apache Tomcat and Java Servlets
are all the rage these days and are likely to be for some time.
L.A.M.P. will get you deep enough into understanding the Web Server's
psychology and methods, that it will prop up your foray into this
Java-centric paradigm.

+ learn Microsoft IIS and Miscrosoft (not Apache) ASP -- if for no
other reason than you will need to know it! Yes, both are horrific
scars upon the face of technology, but they are used in the elusive
'Enterprise' and you would be served well in knowing them. However,
there are a few good reasons for NOT focusing primarily on MS
technologies. First, they are not cross-platform. The Web is. Capisce?
Secondly, they do not dominate the Web server/platform market as yet.
Third, you can always benefit from being able to convert failing MS
platform installations to the L.A.M.P and Tomcat/JSP platforms (read
consulting $$)!

I happen to also read a few developer ezines that share a lot of
insight in the forms, implementation, and Web-app look 'n' feel
departments:

http://alistapart.com -- categorized and annotated, not too bad as a heads-up

http://digital-web.com -- well-rounded pro zine with links to good
howto sites, et al.

Hope any of this helps.

BTW, I probably will end up showing up to the meeting in Januaray.
Consider yourself forewarned ;)

Cheers
Ray

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 22:30:19 -0600, Tim McDonough <tim@mcdonough.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 17:08:47 -0600, Ken Keefe wrote:
> > I have recently done this. Not to say that I am a know-it-all by
> > any means, but I think I have been where you want to go. Here is
> > what I did to get my feet drenched in web development...
> ...
> > Something that you want to be very clear that you understand is the
> > difference between client-side dynamic content (DHTML, Javascript)
> > and server-side dynamic content (PHP, Perl, Python, ASP, JSP, the
> > list goes on...).
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has replied so far. Lots of good suggestions to
> study.
> 
> A bit of clarification...
> 
> I want to do things on the server so the user only has to have a
> browser be it IE, Firefox, Opera, etc. No special plug-ins, downloaded
> modules, javascript enabled in the browser, etc.
> 
> I have some basic HTML experience and some experience with PHP but
> nothing fancy in either case, just enough to grab some data from a
> MySQL database and present it on a web page using MySQL, Apache, and
> PHP.
> 
> I guess having read the comments so far the part I'm missing is a good
> reference on using HTML/PHP to do forms, etc. The knowledge I'm
> lacking is how to display a nicely formatted form, collect and
> validate user input, and return results back to the form for editing
> or viewing.
> 
> 
> 
> Tim
> 
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