Explore creating scalable PHP web applications, structuring code efficiently, managing data storage, and implementing automated testing to ensure robustness and maintainability in real-world projects.

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Serve /usercode (quiet composer install)

execute_apcu

This course is for people who have already learned the basics of PHP (or just finished the "Learn PHP from Scratch" course) and want the bigger picture of making big web applications with this language.

First, you'll learn how all PHP web applications communicate with the world and how to turn multiple source code files into one application. Then you'll learn multiple approaches to structuring the whole application. It will help you write code that's easy to maintain. Also, this is a common topic for job interview questions.

Next, you'll learn different data storage methods, from user sessions to databases. This course doesn't duplicate the official documentation but instead provides an overview of the various tools you can use. You'll learn how to use them in PHP, their tradeoffs, and how to pick what's best for your project.

Finally, you'll learn how to make automated tests for your project to ensure that it works as expected.

Developing Web Applications with PHP

We’re going to build web applications. What makes them different from typical applications is the use of HTTP as the main interface. HTTP is, by definition, a protocol for transferring hypertext. 
So, what  does hypertext look like?

 This document is hypertext. But also, there’s a whole language which tells the browser how to render the document. It’s called **HyperText Markup Language (HTML)**.


This lesson is an overview of HTML. It aims to familiarize us with the language so that we can later use the HTML specification or references to solve specific problems. We’ll also mention CSS and JavaScript. We won’t cover HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in detail because they belong to front-end development. But still, we need to be familiar with these topics because the PHP application’s job is often to produce HTML documents.


# HTML syntax

A simple HTML document looks like this:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Roboworld</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Welcome to Roboworld</h1>
    <p>Click <a href="/robots/">here</a> for some robot photos!</p>
    
  </body>
</html>

This document has the title "Roboworld." The browser will show it in the window title. Also, it has a header and a paragraph of text with a link to the `/robots/` page.

Let's look closer at what we see here.

## Tags

The HTML document consists of elements defined by tags. We separate tags from the text content with angle brackets (`<>`). Usually, there are opening and closing tags. Everything between them is the element content. Both tags contain the element name. The closing tag also starts with a slash character.

For example, this is the heading element definition. The element name is `h1`.


## Attributes

The name and content aren’t always enough to define an HTML element. Each element can also have any number of attributes defined as key-value pairs in the opening tag.

For example, there is a hyperlink element (`<a>` tag) on the following image. Browsers need two things to render a link element—the link content and the URL. We provide the URL in the `href` attribute. The attribute `target` tells which tab to open the link in, while `_blank` means a new tab.


Learn the basics of the HTML syntax and some HTML elements.

Introduction

Communicating with the Client

Static Web Application

Structuring Code Files

Application Architecture Basics

PHP-Based Web Application

Storing State

Databases

Using a Database in the PHP Application

Testing

Testing the PHP Application

Advanced Architecture Patterns

Final Assessment

Conclusion

HTML Documents

HTML syntax

Tags

Attributes