Web Development Tutorial

This article is under construction

As more and more devices begin to be connected to the Internet, the need for a web interface surfaces. This tutorial guides you through a web-development lesson. Please be advised that I (Preet) am not a web developer by profession, so this probably shouldn't be a basis of a professional website. On the other hand, this can serve as a to-the-point lesson on how to development a website in minutes while using the latest and greatest tools such as AJAX and Jquery.

Resources Required

• Get my Web Development Package (WDP) from SourceForge
• Linux PC with LAMP (Google it up!)

  LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL and PHP.

  These are essential ingredients of any website.

• Experience with C.

  C is all you'll need and you'll learn PHP and Javascript "on-the-fly" :)

• Firefox

  Also install "FireBug" (again, google it up!)

If you don't have a Linux PC, I encourage you to run a virtual machine with Linux such as Ubuntu. I have an in-house linux PC dedicated for backup, media server, web server and more! So if you haven't invested in one, invest in a linux box now!

WDP (Web Development Package) Contents

The main contents of the WDP are :

• Bootstrap from Twitter
• JQuery and JQuery UI
• index.php

  Homepage (and the only HTML page) - you will never modify this

• jsphp.js (Client side file)

  Your javascript code goes here.

  This code helps you communicate with phpjs.php

• phpjs.php (Server side file)

  PHP code that interacts with jsphp.js

• sitelib.php and common.php

  More server side code

Hello World

The first thing you want to do is setup your LAMP or get the web server up and running. Then, deploy the WDP package into your web server directory and make sure you get get to the website to begin with. If you did everything correctly, you'll see the following if you browse to http://localhost :

WDP Page

Learn by Doing

Since you will learn best by actually coding, let's just jump straight into a new page you wish to create and through this process, you will learn the role of each of the source code files described above. Due to the nature of this WDP, all of the user interaction is handled by Javascript and the web-page never reloads unlike usual websites out there. This is similar to how Facebook and Gmail work.

Modify Title Menu

Open up sitelib.php and modify getNavBar() by adding a new menu:

$barContent .= '<li><a href="#" onClick="myMenuHandler()"><b>My Menu</b></a></li>';

Notes:

• PHP uses variables that begin with $ and . is used as a += to concatenate a string.
• myMenuHandler() is a javascript function you will add to jsphp.js

Open up jsphp.js and add your function that will be invoked once My Menu will be clicked.

function myMenuHandler()
{
    updateMainContent('<div class="well">You clicked the my menu link!</div>');
}

Notes:

• updateMainContent() is the function that will update the main viewing area of the web-page
• We simply use some HTML to display

Client-Server Interaction

Clicking a menu item and displaying static information is not very useful. Let's suppose that you wanted to get an array of integers from server side ... let's go through this lesson!
Reminder:

• Javascript is client side and knows nothing about server
• PHP code is server side.

Jump Into Some Ajax

Let's continue from myMenuHandler and request some information from server. Let's add some code in:

function myMenuHandler()
{
    sendAjaxRequest("getIntegers", "",
                     function(response) {
                     }
                    );
}

As is, save all the files, and press Ctrl+F5 in your web browser to reload the web-page. Ctrl+F5 will also refresh the javascript file you modified because browsers tend to cache this file. Now simply click on My Menu and you will get an error message! This is because you haven't handled what happens when AJAX Request "getIntegers" occurs at the server side :

WDP PHP Error

Handle the AJAX Request in PHP

Open up phpjs.php and add the following code:

else if($javascriptReqType == "getIntegers")
{
    $response = array('ok' => true, 'msg' => "OK");
    $response['integers'] = array(1, 2, 3);
}

Notes :

• PHP code is setup to store the "getIntegers" you sent from sendAjaxRequest into $javascriptReqType.
• $response is the array returned back to Javascript

  You can add your data to this array by an index name, such as 'integers' used above.

At this stage, what you've accomplished is to send "getIntegers" AJAX request from Javascript, and in PHP, you are returning three variables back:

• response.ok
• response.msg
• response.integers (array)

Interpret the Data in Javascript

Now, let's use this data in Javascript by modifying myMenuHandler() @ jsphp.js :

function myMenuHandler()
{
    sendAjaxRequest("getIntegers", "",
                     function(response) {
                         var html = '<table class="table table-striped"></tr>';
                         for(var i=0; i<response.integers.length; i++) {
                             html += '<td>' + response.integers[i] + '</td>';
                         }
                         html += '</tr></table>';

                         updateMainContent(html);
                     }
                    );
}

Notes :

• Your function in Javascript receives the response array members from PHP
• You can access the data using response followed by a . and the members

WDP Data displayed

Firebug

Let's test the My Menu item again, but this time with Firebug enabled. To enable Firebug, hit F12 button in Firefox. After you click on My Menu you can visually see the data sent from Ajax and the data received from PHP :

WDP Firebug POST

WDP Firebug Response