Posted by Toby A Inkster on 06/07/07 07:07

Toby wrote:

> also, something that i can run a 'virtual server' on my pc so i dont
> have to upload to test every time i make a change to the php code.

There's nothing 'virtual' about that -- what you're describing *is* a
server. You can download servers from many places. Apache is by far the
best <http://httpd.apache.org>. Though you probably don't want to get it
directly from source -- there are various more user-friendly things
available which package it up, making it easier to install, and
pre-configuring a lot of things for you. If you're using Windows, Googling
for 'WAMP' will reveal all; for Mac 'MAMP'; and for Linux, Apache and PHP
probably came with your distribution.

> is this what dreamweaver does?

No; and because it doesn't, it's pretty useless for anything more than
basic PHP development. If you're mostly writing HTML and only using PHP to
output very tiny chunks, then you can probably make reasonable use of
Dreamweaver. But as soon as you get into the realms of writing full pages
in PHP, Dreamweaver's design view becomes useless, and you're stuck in
code view -- which is basically an $800 glorified version of Notepad.
There's nothing wrong with glorified versions of Notepad, but you can
obtain them for a lot less than $800. (e.g. SciTE, NEdit, TextWranger.)

You know C++ you say. The best way for you to approach PHP is probably
almost as if it were C++. A PHP page is analogous to a command-line C++
program, which reads all its input from environment variables and outputs
only to STDOUT and STDERR; no GUI anything, and no access to STDIN; and
the output to STDOUT should be in HTML rather than plain text. Think of
PHP that way.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.12-12mdksmp, up 103 days, 14:36.]

URLs in demiblog
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/05/31/demiblog-urls/

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