Appendix D. Installing and Running PHP
In keeping with our assertion that Scriptaculous and Prototype can play well with a range of server-side technologies, we’ve developed the examples for this book in more than one server-side language. In appendix C you saw how to set up Apache Tomcat to run the Java-based examples. In this appendix, we’ll look at installing PHP, the server language we used to build the back end for our QuickGallery applications in chapters 2–4 and 12.
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language originally designed to run on Unix-based systems, although it can now run on Windows too. It is probably the most commonly used scripting language on the Web, and certainly most Unix-based ISPs and web-hosting solutions will offer PHP as standard. You might therefore like to run QuickGallery on your hosted web site, in which case PHP will already be installed for you. The instructions here apply primarily to installing PHP on your own development machines, in order to play with our example applications.
PHP is an extensible system and suffers from rather poor separation of the modules from the core product. Further, the core system can be configured in more than one way. As a result, installs of PHP differ widely from one machine to another.