Chapter 2. Setting Up the Development Environment

The first chapter highlighted the fact that all development should take place on a copy of the website on a computer to which the public has no access. This computer was called the development machine, and is where most of your time will be spent getting everything right before transferring the more or less finished product to the live site. In order to be able to work effectively, and ensure that the development environment provides us with everything we need to be able to deliver our website, we need to find, download, and install the following software:

• PHP: PHP is the language in which osCommerce is written. Recently it has received a major upgrade and is now more or less a fully functional Object Oriented Language, with some very powerful features. PHP is widely used on the Internet for a multitude of different projects and is renowned for its ease of use. The current version of PHP is PHP5, which is what we will use in this book for our demonstration. However, you are welcome to use version 4 because this is what most Internet Service Providers use at present. The good news is that we will not have to delve deeply into programming code in order to build our site—osCommerce handles most, if not all the complex programming issues.

• Apache: This is the web server we will use to serve web pages during the development phase. Apache is the most popular web server on the Internet, with millions of live sites using it every day. In fact, as the Apache website says, it is more widely used than all the other web servers combined.

• MySQL: This is what we will use to store all the information required to keep the website running. Everything from customer details to product information and a host of other things will all be stored in the MySQL database. Keeping with the trend of popularity, MySQL is also the world's most popular bit of database software with over six million active installations worldwide.