How to setup a web development environment

Welcome to our first video tutorial. Where I’m going to show you in detail how to setup a local web development environment. This tutorial is for novices and beginner in web development. Most of us are using Windows systems, this is because I selected WAMP at the most appropriate tool for us. We will install WAMP at our computer, and I will show you how you can use your database (phpMyAdmin), and, as some extra – I will show you a process of making own php-based RSS feed (on PHP).

After you have finished this video, you can copy and test the code we have just made:

01
<?

02
// step 1 - we should connect to database and take all our records:

03
$vLink = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', ''); // this is default username and password for WAMP

04
mysql_select_db('test_db', $vLink);

05
mysql_query('SET names UTF8'); // let's set UTF8 mode (in order to support unicode)

06
$sSQL = 'SELECT * FROM `stories` ORDER BY `id` DESC'; // this is our SQL query to take our records

07
$vRes = mysql_query($sSQL); // execution of query

08
$aStories = array(); // an empty array to collect stories (records)

09
if ($vRes) {

10
    while($aRow = mysql_fetch_array($vRes, MYSQL_ASSOC)) { // lets walk through all the records

11
        $aStories[] = $aRow;

12
    }

13
    mysql_free_result($vRes);

14
}

15
// check

16
// print_r($aStories); // well done

17
// step 2 - display data array as rss feed

18
$sFeeds = '';

19
foreach ($aStories as $aStory) { // let's walk through all the records again and prepare Items for RSS

20
    $sFeeds .= <<<EOF

21
<item>

22
    <guid><![CDATA[{$aStory['id']}]]></guid>

23
    <link><![CDATA[story.php?id={$aStory['id']}]]></link>

24
    <title><![CDATA[{$aStory['title']}]]></title>

25
    <description><![CDATA[{$aStory['description']}]]></description>

26
    <pubDate>{$aStory['when']}</pubDate>

27
</item>

28
EOF;

29
}

30
// now - we should prepare necessary header and output our RSS feed:

31
header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8');

32
echo <<<EOF

33
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

34
<rss version="2.0">

35
    <channel>

36
        <title>Our own RSS feed</title>

37
        <link>http://localhost/feed.php</link>

38
        <description>Our own RSS feed</description>

39
        <lastBuildDate>2012-07-16 00:00:00</lastBuildDate>

40
        {$sFeeds}

41
    </channel>

42
</rss>

43
EOF;

How to setup a web development environment

download package