Backend Introduction

 

When you know the basics of HTML and know how to create a static HTML page you can start with implementing a server backend. The server backend is an application which generates the HTML page dynamically (on the fly) depending on some external input (usually user input and content stored in a database). For example, when you check your email on the web, the page you see contains your current emails (stored somewhere) and only those you want to see (e.g. in your inbox or another folder you have selected).

To create a dynamic page, you need another technology beyond HTML, this can be either:

In this part I will concentrate on the web server approach. I choose to use the PHP language for the server backend, this choice is rather arbitrary as it is not anyhow better or worse than using e.g. Python.

PHP Language

PHP is an interpreted programming language, which means that there is no compilation involved (or rather it’s done automatically behind the scenes). Practically this means that you just write the source code and it gets executed, which simplifies things a lot. PHP has a C-like syntax but otherwise it’s not anyhow similar to C. PHP is a fully fledged language which allows both procedural and object oriented programing. It has a large library of built in functions and extensions. A single file with the PHP code (and .php extensions) is called a PHP script. An application is composed of many scripts usually.

Getting Started

Before you start, you need to have a web server ready. Test that your setup is working by creating this PHP script file:

<?php

echo "<h1>Fant&#244;mas was here!</h1>";

When you display the script in the web browser and everything works correctly, you should see something like this:

Screenshot -- Introduction page

Getting Started

The above example is a simple PHP script, which does only one thing, it prints out (using the command echo) a string of characters <h1>Fant&#244;mas was here!</h1>. As you can see the script starts with the mark <?php which is required (there is also an end mark, which should not be used). Each PHP statement is terminated by a semicolon ;. Comments in the code are marked by // or #, and multi-line comments start with /* and end with */.

The main objective of a PHP application is to generate a HTML page, which gets sent to the web browser, which interprets it and shows the end-user a web page. In PHP the HTML language has no special meaning. For the PHP interpreter, the HTML language is just a string of characters as anything else.

You can see that in the first PHP script above – PHP does not really care what’s inside the string, it just prints it. In case PHP is being used as backend of a web application, this means that the text will get sent to a web browser (which expects it to be HTML).

Working with strings

As working with character strings is really important, let’s dive into it first. You can print a string using the echo or the print command (there is no practical difference between them). A string can be quoted in either single quotes ' or double quotes " (there are some practical differences between them – see below).

When a string is quoted, it means it’s surrounded by quotes (either kind). The chosen quote character cannot be contained in the string itself or it must be escaped. Escaping means removing special meaning of a character (in this case the special meaning is terminate the string). Escaping is done by the backslash \ character. Some examples:

echo "Hello John!"; // valid - string quoted by double quote
echo "Hello John O'Reilly"; // still valid - double quote is not inside the string
echo 'Hello John!'; // valid - string quoted by single quote
echo 'Hello John O'Reilly'; // INVALID - single quote is contained inside the string
echo 'Hello John O\'Reilly'; // VALID again - single quote is contained inside the string, but it is escaped

In echo "Hello John!";, the "Hello John!" is a string literal.

Variables

Variables contain values which can be changed (as opposed to constants). Variables begin with the dollar character $, should be safe names and case sensitive (not always, but sometimes yes – so, to simplify things let’s pretend that they always are).

You can do standard operations with C-like operators - +, -, *, /, =, ==. Additionally in PHP, there is a dot . operator which is used for concatenating strings. The operator = assigns a value to a variable, the operator == compares two values. The operator modulo is %. Examples:

<?php 

$firstName = 'John';
$greeting = "Hi " . $firstName;

echo $greeting;

$count = 1;
$count = $count + 1;
$count += 1;
$count++;

echo $count;

The above example will print Hi John4. As you can see, there are no declarations of variables. In PHP a variable is declared simply by assigning it a value. Because PHP is a dynamically typed language, the type of the variable is defined by the variable content. So $count = 0 is an integer variable and $count = 'many' is a string variable. The type of the variable can change, which is very practical, but can lead to some confusing behavior. All of the lines:

  • $count = $count + 1;
  • $count += 1;
  • $count++;

increment the $count variable by one.

Boolean conversions

It is very useful to know some rules for converting values to the boolean data type (true/false):

  • an empty string and the string '0' is false,
  • an array/list/object with no elements is false,
  • 0 is false,
  • 0.0 is false,
  • null is false,
  • everything else is true.

Let’s have a look at some type conversion examples:

<?php 

$firstName = 'John';
$lastName = 'O\'Reilly'; 

$count = 0;
$colloquialGreeting = "Hi " . $firstName;

$count = $count + 1;
$informalGreting = "Hello " . $firstName . " " . $lastName;

echo "Greeting count: " . $count;

In the above example, we took advantage of the dynamic type system on the line echo "Greeting count: " . $count; where the variable $count is automatically converted to a string and concatenated with the string Greeting count: using a dot . operator. This is an example of how the dynamic types are useful as something like this is more complicated in C++ or Java.

Double-Quoted vs. Single-Quoted strings

Strings in double quotes allow two more features over single-quoted strings:

  • use variables directly without concatenation.
  • use special whitespace characters (\n, \t),

With direct variable use, you can then simply rewrite the above example into:

<?php 

$firstName = 'John';
$lastName = 'O\'Reilly'; 

$count = 0;
$colloquialGreeting = "Hi $firstName";

$count = $count + 1;
$informalGreting = "Hello $firstName $lastName";

echo "Greeting count: $count\n";

Special characters e.g. \n for a new line and \t for a tab character, can be used to put whitespace into the string. So echo "Hi,\nJohn" would actually print:

Hi,
John

None of this is possible in the single quoted string, so echo 'Hi,\nJohn $lastName'; would actually print Hi,\nJohn $lastName.

Mixing with HTML

So far we haven’t done much, because the script outputs only a plain text string. Outputting HTML is no different, it just gets more tangled.

<?php 

echo "<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset='utf-8'>
        <title>PHP Generated page</title>
    </head>
    <body>
";

$firstName = 'John';
$lastName = 'O\'Reilly'; 

$count = 0;
$colloquialGreeting = "Hi $firstName";

$count = $count + 1;
$informalGreting = "Hello " . $firstName . " $lastName";

echo '<p>Salutation count: ' . $count . '</p>';
echo "<ul>";
echo '<li>' . $colloquialGreeting . '</li>';
echo "<li>$informalGreting</li>\n";
echo "</ul>\n";

echo "</body>\n</html>";

In the above example, I intentionally mixed different types of quotes and concatenation methods. Normally you would write things in a more consistent matter.

Task 1 – Contact form

Try to create a contact form like this using PHP echo command (review the HTML form elements if necessary):

Screenshot -- Introduction page

<?php

echo "<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset='utf-8'>
        <title>Contact form</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    	<form method='post' action='http://odinuv.cz/form_test.php'>
    		<ul>
    			<li>
    				<label>E-mail address:
    					<input type='email' name='email'>
    				</label>
    			</li>
    			<li>
    				<label>Message for us:
    					<textarea name='message' cols='50' rows='10'></textarea>
    				</label>
    			</li>
    		</ul>
    		<button type='submit' name='contactButton' value='contact'>Contact Us</button>
    	</form>
	</body>
</html>";

Task 2 – Using variables

Now define the number of columns and rows of the textarea element as PHP variables and output them for the browser.

<?php

$rows = 10;
$cols = 50;

echo "<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset='utf-8'>
        <title>Contact form</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    	<form method='post' action='http://odinuv.cz/form_test.php'>
    		<ul>
    			<li>
    				<label>E-mail address:
    					<input type='email' name='email'>
    				</label>
    			</li>
    			<li>
    				<label>Message for us:
    					<textarea name='message' cols='$cols' rows='$rows'></textarea>
    				</label>
    			</li>
    		</ul>
    		<button type='submit' name='contactButton' value='contact'>Contact Us</button>
    	</form>
	</body>
</html>";

Alternative solution:

<?php

$rows = 10;
$cols = 50;

echo "<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset='utf-8'>
        <title>Contact form</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    	<form method='post' action='http://odinuv.cz/form_test.php'>
    		<ul>
    			<li>
    				<label>E-mail address:
    					<input type='email' name='email'>
    				</label>
    			</li>
    			<li>
    				<label>Message for us:
    					<textarea name='message' cols='" . $cols . "' rows='" . $rows . "'></textarea>
    				</label>
    			</li>
    		</ul>
    		<button type='submit' name='contactButton' value='contact'>Contact Us</button>
    	</form>
	</body>
</html>";

Task 2 – Using variables

Now define the page title and default textarea content as a variable too and set the default message to:

Hello,
I'd like to know more about your product <ProductName>

Best Regards,
<YourName>

Also add a h1 header to the page with the same content as the page title. Hint: You’ll also need to use some HTML entities.

Screenshot -- Introduction page

<?php

$rows = 10;
$cols = 50;
$message = "Hello,\nI'd like to know more about your product &lt;ProductName&gt;\n\nBest Regards,\n&lt;YourName&gt;";
$pageTitle = "Contact form";

echo "<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset='utf-8'>
        <title>$pageTitle</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>$pageTitle</h1>
    	<form method='post' action='http://odinuv.cz/form_test.php'>
    		<ul>
    			<li>
    				<label>E-mail address:
    					<input type='email' name='email'>
    				</label>
    			</li>
    			<li>
    				<label>Message for us:
    					<textarea name='message' cols='$cols' rows='$rows'>$message</textarea>
    				</label>
    			</li>
    		</ul>
    		<button type='submit' name='contactButton' value='contact'>Contact Us</button>
    	</form>
	</body>
</html>";

There are many different solutions to the above, so your solution does not have to look the same as my solution. Make sure to verify your solution using the HTML validator, and check that the message in the text area has the correct whitespace.

Divide and conquer

You can find yourself in a situation when you have two similar pages which share e.g. a common header and/or footer part. And now you are thinking about updating both of them – you have to open both PHP files and make same changes in the same part of the code. To avoid duplication of the code you can use the require command which finds the file by specified paths and “includes” it as if the source code of that included file was written instead of that command:

File commonHeader.php:

<?php

echo "<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>$pageTitle</title>
        <meta charset=\"utf-8\" />
    </head>
    <body>";
echo "<h1>$pageTitle</h1>";

File page1.php:

<?php

$pageTitle = "Page about cars";
require "commonHeader.php";

File page2.php:

<?php

$pageTitle = "Page about ships";
require "commonHeader.php";

This is not the best example because the included file requires you to define a variable $pageTitle beforehand. But I wanted to demonstrate the behavior of the included source code. Usually the role is opposite – you include the file to use something from it. An important thing is that such a concept allows you to divide the logic and reuse your code. In the next chapters you will learn about functions and classes. With them it is more natural to use the require command to load libraries of reusable functions.

Remarks:

  • There is also an include command, which does not cause critical error when the referenced file is not found.
  • Moreover, there are the include_once and require_once commands which ignore multiple inclusion of the same file.
  • More advanced PHP systems support automatic loading based on namespaces and class names.

Summary

Now you should be able to create simple PHP scripts which output a HTML page. You should be familiar with PHP variables and know about the dynamic type system. You should be able to divide script into multiple files using require and avoid code duplications. Be sure to exercise different approaches to writing and concatenating strings, because all of them are widely used. Before continuing further, make sure you are not confused by the quotes all around the place.

New Concepts and Terms

  • Backend
  • PHP
  • Strings
  • String Concatenation (dot)
  • Escaping
  • Variables
  • Dynamic Types
  • require command

Control question

  • What is the difference between require and require_once?
  • What is the difference between require and include?
  • How is the type of variable determined in PHP? How do you change the type?