Employee Contacts (Part 5) – Building the Presentation Layer with PHP and HTML

1. Building the MySQL database.
2. Building a Data Abstraction Layer with PHP
3. Building the Data Access Layer with PHP
4. Building the Business Object Layer with PHP
5. Building the Presentation Layer with PHP & HTML

Part 1 of this series covered building the MySQL database. In Part2, we built the data abstraction layer. With Part 3, we built our data access layer. At the data access layer, we made generated the queries to execute through the data abstraction layer. Part 4 of our series dealt with the business object layer and implementing one of our business rules. Finally, in Part 5, we are ready to begin our presentation layer. We will not be dealing with how to properly format the page, or creating forms. Our goal is to show you how to move data between the presentation layer and the business layer.

Installing Debian on Virtual PC 2007

The company I work for has defined Virtual PC as our corporate standard for virtualization. As a result, getting any distro on Linux to run is can be a huge pain. For my own reasons, I prefer using Linux for running MySQL, Apache, & PHP. I am very aware of the fact that I could do all of this on the Windows OS, but I still prefer to do it under Linux. So I wanted to install debian and I could not find anything online about doing so. This is the first time I ever worked with debian, so I had that additional challenge.

So I started out by finding this entry at `The Sean Blog` about running Ubuntu from Virtual PC 2007. Of course you can’t really follow the steps, as you won’t find most of these in the debian install. We will not go through every step of the install as most of it is just common sense as to what to select. For the most part I simply selected the defaults and continued on. It wasn’t until after the first boot proceeding the installation that I had to do anything.

Employee Contacts (Part 4) – Building the Business Object Layer with PHP

1. Building the MySQL database.
2. Building a Data Abstraction Layer with PHP
3. Building the Data Access Layer with PHP
4. Building the Business Object Layer with PHP
5. Building the Presentation Layer with PHP & HTML

Part 1 of this series covered building the MySQL database. In Part2, we built the data abstraction layer. With Part 3, we built our data access layer. At the data access layer, we made generated the queries to execute through the data abstraction layer. Part 4 of our series will cover the business object layer.

With the business layer, often times it will seem like we are simply making calls to the data access layer. And yes, that is true but remember that we are planning for future growth. A little extra time now can save you hours later down the road, and lead to far less headaches. As you will see when we build our presentation level, we should never make a direct call to the data access layer, those calls should be handled through our business layer.