Abby and Win’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘MySQL’

I’ve been developing web sites for almost 10 years now. I’m still in search of a way to develop faster. I find myself doing things over and over again.

I use PHP as the programming language to develop the web apps with MySQL database. I started to look for different frameworks – but most use MVC and I don’t have time to learn it.

Some have suggested to do validation using MySQL. This helps a bit so I don’t have to write more PHP code to validate whether or not the record exists, foreign key constraints, etc. Plus it really is good practice to have these in place in the database layer.

Next I looked in to template engines to help with the layout of the site. It does help quite a bit but I’m still left with a lot of PHP code. I use Dreamweaver to write code and I used to use its automated code writing but I found it too messy and inefficient. Now I only use it because the FTP client is built in, has a file checkout system and in CS5 it can read included files so I have easy access to them. The error check is nice too. It catches many syntax errors right away. It can read used variables and be a part of the autocomplete feature.

I tried using existing systems like CMS or blogs (Joomla and WordPress). I figured I can create add-ons on top of an existing system. Joomla uses the MVC framework. WordPress on the other hand is easier to figure out how to build on top of it. Plus their documentation is really easy to follow. One of the limitations I found is the lack of access levels. Another is the pre-existing environment may not fit with a project since it’s so customized – better to be built from the ground up.

I’ve been peeking into the .NET framework off and on. I don’t primarily use Windows at all. I’m mostly on a Mac or using some sort of Linux flavor. I do have Windows7 running virtually on my MBP and iMac so I can play with it. I have played with Visual Studio and it felt easy to use plus it seemed to make developing quick. The drawbacks I’ve found are Windows hosting is more expensive than Linux hosting, IDEs are expensive and run mostly on Windows OS, and I don’t like creating online applications that can potentially only work with Internet Explorer (does not support web standards and only available on Windows OS).

Rails looks promising with the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) approach. I’ve tried to look into it and even bought some books and watched some screencasts. It’s a great language but I can’t seem to understand how to authenticate/authorize different users. They have many different plugins that I can use but each one uses their own way of doing it.

I guess I’ll keep looking. Either I’ll find time to learn MVC framework, get better at Rails, or someone will develop a new platform to speed up web development.

For the past couple of days I’ve been trying to set up one of our XServe running Leopard Server at work for web hosting. I was able to configure the Web, AFP, and SMB properly. The problem I was having was configuring MySQL. It was easy to enable but trying to connect to it from other computers in the same domain was the problem. There’s a checkbox with “Allow network connections” in the Server Admin section of MySQL. So I checked it, save, and restarted it. I still wasn’t able to connect. I checked for firewall settings. I pinged the host and got a response. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. So I googled it.

The common answer I found was to edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file. Well it’s not there but I did find a /etc/my.cnf file. So I tried editing that file and restarting. It didn’t work.

Then I remembered that the php.ini file that Leopard Server is using isn’t in the default location /etc/php.ini, but it ran the /private/etc/php.ini. So I looked in there and found another my.cnf file. I edited the file by adding # in front of skip-networking entry. I restarted it and it finally worked.

So here’s what you need to do:

• Go into Server Admin and check the Allow network connections and save
• Comment out the skip-networking entry from /private/etc/my.cnf
• Add the IP address of the computer you will be accessing MySQL remotely
• Give it the privileges it needs
• Restart MySQL

That should allow you to connect to MySQL running on Leopard Server remotely.

We recently installed OS X Leopard Server at work. I had to take MySQL databases from our old Tiger Server and restore them onto the new XServes. Both servers are running MySQL Server version 5.0.45 but our Tiger server is running MySQL Client version 5.0.22 while our Leopard servers are running MySQL Client version 5.1.18. According to MySQL’s documentation (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqldump.html):

Prior to release 5.0.48, this option did not create valid SQL if the database dump contained views. The recreation of views requires the creation and removal of temporary tables and this option suppressed the removal of those temporary tables. As a workaround, use --compress with the --add-drop-table option and then manually adjust the dump file.

I tried the –compress option but it didn’t work. I still had to manually adjust the SQL file. The I tried the GUI tool from MySQL, http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html (MySQL Administrator).

Once you create the backup, you can restore it using the same application on the newer server. It will even include the views. Once you start using the newer client, you shouldn’t have a problem restoring databases with views from backups made with the mysqldump command.