Getting Started With Php Development – Part 2

By Author: diwiyne johnson
Total Articles: 25
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In the previous article, I gave you some introduction about PHP and getting started with it. We ended with the installation of XAMPP. Now let us proceed to open the XAMPP control panel.
On this Control Panel, first click the START option which will embark the Apache software. If you do not wish to open the Control Panel to start APache, press the 1st SVC button and press the exit option to close the Control Panel. Now your web server is ready for use. Point your web browser to http://localhost. If everything has been done properly then you will see a message -'It Works!' on the screen where you opened http://localhost.
Selecting A Source Code Editor
If you write your PHP code in a word processing editor such as MS Word then you may include all junk characters such as style definitions etc in your code. PHP cannot process this junk and so you will need a text editor such as a Notepad or Notepad++. Text editors do not include any junk characters; they simply produce plain text which is the only thing that PHP comprehends.
Highlighting Syntax
After you write few lines of code in the notepad, you need ...
... to check it if it produces the desired results. If you have forgotten a single quote on a specific line, it may not be able to run your script. If it's just few lines of code it is not that tough to check which quote you forgot. But, if you are testing a thousand lines of code, then what would you do? It is that this stage that Syntax Highlighting assumes an important role. When you enable it, you can view different colors for instructions, declarations etc. It will be easy for you to check the missing quote in those thousand lines of coding.
A number of source code editors come with syntax highlighting. Source code editors provide a number of helpful options. Notepad++ is the most preferred one as it is simple to use.
Till here, we have installed XAMPP, and a source code editor but we now need to check if PHP is installed or not. Open Notepad++, copy and paste-

in a new text document and save it as code.php in your webroot. You can also save the file with any other name that you can easily remember. Webroot servers as directory used by APACHE to retrieve files.
You can find the webroot in xampp\htdocs (the default value for Windows is C:\xampp\htdocs). If you are using a web host, then you should take the FTP details for using the webroot from your provider. This helps you in transferring files to a web server. Point your browser to http://localhost/info.php and if you are able to see PHP version and other details on the screen then it implies that you have correctly installed PHP. If nothing happens, then it implies that PHP is not correctly installed and so the PHP code will not be parsed. Your browser may not identify tag and may not process them.

Diwiyne Johnson is working as a content writer at vanitypoint, he has a relevant experience of writing content about software,
PHP Web Development,
PHP website developer Irvineetc.