Tom Muck's

Tom Muck's looper extension comes in two versions—a free one that performs the basic task of looping a recordset across several rows and columns, and a commercial one ($19) that offers a number of advanced features. These revised instructions are based on the free version, but you may want to consider buying the commercial one. Tom is a well-respected member of the Dreamweaver community and has a lot of experience developing Dreamweaver extensions.

Selecting Web listener networks (IP addresses)

The Web listener network, or networks, that you select depend on the networks from which clients will connect to the published Web server. For example, if the Web site you are publishing allows client requests from the Internet (External network), you should select the External network for the Web listener. By selecting the External network, you are selecting the IP addresses on the ISA Server computer that are associated with the External network adapter. If you do not limit the IP addresses, all the IP addresses associated with the selected network adapter will be included in the listener configuration.

Network Basics

•

•A host is a computer that is enabled to function on a network

•any set of hosts connected in such a way that any two hosts can send and receive messages is called a network

–a protocol is the method by which two computers agree to communicate

–an address space is the set of names of computers that can be referenced

History of the Internet

•Internet traffic grew

–Businesses spent heavily to improve Internet

•Better service their clients

–Fierce competition among communications carriers and hardware and software suppliers

–Result

•Bandwidth (info carrying capacity) of Internet increased tremendously

•Costs plummeted

Multidimensional Arrays

Arrays do not have to be a simple list of keys and values—each location in the array can
hold another array.This way, we can create a two-dimensional array.You can think of a
two dimensional array as a matrix, or grid, with width and height or rows and columns.
If we want to store more than one piece of data about each of Bob’s products, we
could use a two-dimensional array.
Figure 3.3 shows Bob’s products represented as a two-dimensional array with each
row representing an individual product and each column representing a stored product
attribute.

What Is an Array?

A scalar variable is a
named location in which to store a value; similarly, an array is a named place to store a
set of values, thereby allowing you to group scalars.
Bob’s product list will be the array for our example. In Figure 3.1, you can see a list
of three products stored in an array format and one variable, called products, which
stores the three values. (We’ll look at how to create a variable like this in a minute.)
After we have the information as an array, we can do a number of useful things with it.
Using the looping constructs from Chapter 1, we can save work by performing the same
actions on each value in the array.The whole set of information can be moved around as
a single unit

File Modes

The operating system on the server needs to know what you want to do with a file that
you are opening. It needs to know if the file can be opened by another script while you
have it open, and to work out if you (the owner of the script) have permission to use it
in that way. Essentially, file modes give the operating system a mechanism to determine
how to handle access requests from other people or scripts and a method to check that
you have access and permission to this particular file.
There are three choices you need to make when opening a file:
1. You might want to open a file for reading only, for writing only, or for both reading
and writing.
2. If writing to a file, you might want to overwrite any existing contents of a file or
to append new data to the end of the file.
3. If you are trying to write to a file on a system that differentiates between binary
and text files, you might want to specify this.

Overview of File Processing

There are three steps to writing data to a file:
1. Open the file. If the file doesn’t already exist, it will need to be created.
2. Write the data to the file.
3. Close the file.
Similarly, there are three steps to reading data from a file:
1. Open the file. If the file can’t be opened (for example, if it doesn’t exist), we need
to recognize this and exit gracefully.
2. Read data from the file.
3. Close the file.
When you want to read data from a file, you have choices about how much of the file to
read at a time.We’ll look at each of those choices in detail.
For now, we’ll start at the beginning by opening a file.

Using PHP

In order to work through the examples in this chapter and the rest of the book, you will
need access to a Web server with PHP installed.To get the most from the examples and
case studies, you should run them and try changing them.To do this, you’ll need a testbed
where you can experiment.
If PHP is not installed on your machine, you will need to begin by installing it, or
getting your system administrator to install it for you.You can find instructions for doing
so in Appendix A,“Installing PHP 4 and MySQL.”

php Course

In this book, you’ll learn how to use PHP by working through lots of real world
examples, taken from our experience in building e-commerce sites. Often programming
textbooks teach basic syntax with very simple examples.We have chosen not to do that.
We recognize that often what you want to do is get something up and running, to
understand how the language is used, rather than plowing through yet another syntax
and function reference that’s no better than the online manual.