PHP and MySQL
The SQL in MySQL stands for structured query language. SQL is a database application that is used to store data, that data can be anything from numbers to text to images. Databases are often used to create dynamic websites, websites that change or need to be changed on a daily basis. An examples of SQL would be an online address book. A user may need to input a new contact and then save that contact for future reference, thus the internet has now become a tool that is easily accessible and functional all at the same time. Image is you could store every lead and contact online and then access or update that information with any computer as long as you have an internet connection and a web browser on that computer.
PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. Kind of confusing since the first P in PHP stands for PHP. Anyways, PHP is an open source solution programing language. PHP is used in the same ways that ASP and ASP.NET is used, however PHP is free and you can run it on a LINUX server as apposed to a WINDOWS Server. The benefit here is obviously that a Windows Server costs thousands of dollars and a Linux Server is free. The great thing about all of this is that you, the customer don't have to worry about it because STEPHENCARR.NET will take care of developing and programing your website.
For many of the website that STEPHENCARR.NET builds we insert code to capture and record the vistors information. When we have this information recorded it makes it easier to track down when someone tries to hack or mess with your website. In a sense we log who views our website and we can do it with exceptional accuracy. The information above along with a little bit of other information can lead us to the specific user and their specific location. Security is the main reason we do this. In today's world you need to not only have a great looking website, you need to have a secure and safe website.
Once we record the vistors IP Address and the visitors ISP information we can supply this info into a reverse lookup and find out who the customer is of any ISP. Knowing the ISP is very important because they are the the ones responsible for providing you internet. We give your IP Address to the ISP and they can in turn help us prosecute or red flag visitors that have done some bad things. With all of our visitors we record their IP's and their ISP's as well as they time and date they have visited our site. All of this information is then stored in a MySQL Database where we can querry any of that information at any time. Google Analytics also helps web developers track their visitors, but Google Analytics does not provide IP's or ISP's and that is where we come in.
More Useful PHP Information:
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel. On May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. As of August, 2008 this branch is up to version 4.4.9. PHP 4 is no longer under development nor will any security updates be released. On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming, the PHP Data Objects extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases), and numerous performance enhancements. In 2008, PHP 5 became the only stable version under development. Late static binding has been missing from PHP and has been added in version 5.3. PHP 6 is under development alongside PHP 5. Major changes include the removal of register_globals, magic quotes, and safe mode. The reason for the removals was that register_globals had given way to security holes, and magic quotes had an unpredictable nature, and was best avoided. Instead, to escape characters, magic quotes may be substituted with the addslashes() function, or more appropriately an escape mechanism specific to the database vendor itself like mysql_real_escape_string() for MySQL. Functions that will be removed in PHP 6 have been deprecated in PHP 5.3 and will produce a warning if used. Many high-profile open-source projects ceased to support PHP 4 in new code as of February 5, 2008, because of the GoPHP5 initiative, provided by a consortium of PHP developers promoting the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5. PHP currently does not have native support for Unicode or multibyte strings; Unicode support will be included in PHP 6 and will allow strings as well as class, method and function names to contain non-ASCII characters. PHP interpreters are available on both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, but on Microsoft Windows the only official distribution is a 32-bit implementation, requiring Windows 32-bit compatibility mode while using Internet Information Services (IIS) on a 64-bit Windows platform. As of PHP 5.3.0, experimental 64-bit versions are available for MS Windows.