Assignment 9
PHP is a backend server side language and framework. It allows you to run "server side code", meaning code that runs and performs calculations before the content is sent to the user. The server code may be complex, but the only output that will appear in the browser is generated code that the server made for it during its calculations.
I won't go through the effort of explaining how to install or use PHP. There will come many times in your computing career that something new needs to be integrated or installed and your job becomes figuring out how to use it and make it work in your environment. More often than not there is no hand holding for stuff like this, and your assignment will be simply "get PHP working on this machine".
For the assignments below, make each one in its own code file in your git project. They should be .php files. Whether you use IIS or XAMPP or any other PHP running method is irrelevant.
Write a working Hello World in php that has a well formed HTML document around it with a p tag, and generated php output inside this tag that says "Hello World"
Write a php page similar to the first one, but instead of Hello World it says "Hello, {name}" where name is a query string argument named "name". If no value was provided for this query string, print instead "Hello, John Doe. I say this because I don't know your name!"
Intentionally make an error in a php page, such as forgetting a semicolon. Perhaps you already did in the previous assignments! By default, php will not display to you what the error is, as you wouldn't want users of the server to see the errors in case it gave away sensitive information. There are ways to make the page show the errors, however, in the php configuration (php.ini). Make errors show on the page and leave a comment in the file of what the error said.
Make a page that takes in a query string variable of values separated by underscores. In your PHP code, turn that value into an array of just the values without underscores, like the split function worked in Javascript. Then use these array values to generate an html page of bulleted list items using ul and li tags.
Make an html page with a form that has a textbox and submit button. Clicking the button will submit the form to the php page in problem 2, submitting to it the textbox value as the name query string. On the php page, under the text that's already there, print out onto the page the HTTP method. What does this mean? What other methods are there?