Which Platform is Better for Web Development?

There are many platforms available for web applications development. This section compares PHP to a few other platforms and highlights some of PHP’s and MySQL’s strengths.

Cost

PHP is one of the “P’s” in the popular LAMP stack. The LAMP stack refers to the popular combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python that runs many web sites /applications and powers many small & large web applications. Many of the components of the LAMP stack are free / Open Source. PHP is free, as in there is no cost to develop in and run programs made with PHP language. Though MySQL’s license and costs have changed, you can obtain the Community Server edition for free. MySQL offers several levels of support contracts for their database server. Both PHP and MySQL run on a variety of platforms, including many variants of Linux, Microsoft Windows, and others. Running on an operating system such as Linux gives the opportunity for a completely free web application platform, with no up-front costs.

Of course, when talking about software development and application platforms, the up-front cost of  software licensing is only a portion of the total cost of ownership. Years of real-world experience with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP in production environments has proved that the total cost of maintaining these platforms is lower, many times much lower, than maintaining an infrastructure with proprietary, non-free software.

Ease of Use

When compared to many other programming languages, PHP makes it easy to develop powerful web applications quickly. Many of the most useful specific functions (such as those for opening a connection to an Oracle database or fetching e‑mail from an Internet Message Access Protocol [IMAP] server) are predefined for you. A lot of complete scripts are waiting out there for you to look at as you’re learning PHP.

Most advanced PHP users (including most of the development team members) are diehard handcoders.They tend to share certain gut-level, subcultural assumptions — for instance, that handwritten code is beautiful and clean and maximally browser-compatible and therefore the only way
to go — that they do not hesitate to express in vigorous terms. The PHP community offers help and trades tips mostly by e‑mail, and if you want to participate, you have to be able to parse plain-text source code with facility.  PHP really is easy to learn and write, especially for those with a little
bit of experience in a C-syntaxed programming language. It’s just a little more involved than HTML. This small learning curve means that relatively inexperienced programmers can sometimes make mistakes that turn into large security issues.

If you have no relational database experience, or are coming from an environment such as Microsoft Access, MySQL’s command-line interface and lack of implicit structure may at first seem a little daunting. MySQL has a few GUI (graphical user interface) tools to help work with databases.

What Is MySQL?

MySQL (pronounced My Ess Q El) is an open source, SQL relational database management system (RDBMS) that is free. Early in its history, MySQL occasionally faced opposition because of its lack of support for some core SQL constructs such as subselects and foreign keys. Ultimately, however, MySQL found a broad, enthusiastic user base for its liberal licensing terms, perky performance, and ease of use. Its acceptance was aided in part by the wide variety of other technologies such as PHP, Perl, Python, and the like that have encouraged its use through stable, well-documented modules and extensions.

Databases are generally useful, perhaps the most consistently useful family of software products (the “killer product”) in modern computing. Like many competing products, both free and commercial, MySQL isn’t a database until you give it some structure and form. You might think of this as the difference between a database and an RDBMS i.e., RDBMS plus user requirements equal a database.