Chinese New Year Special: LAMP and CodeIgniter

10 February is the Chinese New Year. I went back to my home in Malaysia  As a multiracial country, Malaysia celebrates this festival with great fanfare as well. So, in the past few days, I got to play and eat a lot without worrying about my work too much. Also, I had more time to work on some personal projects. =D

Since it’s a new year, I decided to work on a totally new project with PHP, a language that I have not been using for about one year. With a few years of experience on using PHP and Drupal, I would like to try a new PHP web application framework which is known as CodeIgniter. I first heard it from my friend last year but I only got the time to play with it now.

Install LAMP

After Windows 8 on my laptop was expired, I changed to use Fedora a few weeks ago. Hence, I am a beginner in the world of Linux. Before working on the PHP project, I have to install the LAMP programs, like Apache, MySQL and PHP on my laptop again.

There are some helpful tutorials online to install three of them. Here is just a list of websites that I referred to during the installation process.

• How to Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Fedora
• Install MySQL 5.5.30 on Fedora 18/17, CentOS/Red Hat (RHEL) 6.3/5.9
• Howto- Install LAMP server in Fedora 17

Hello-world Project: Hack Life

CodeIgniter is using MVC design pattern, something I never heard of before when I was developing web app using Drupal. Drupal does not comply with the MVC design. I just googled and found that Drupal is actually using something called PAC (Presentation-Abstraction-Control) design pattern.

There are very simple and detailed getting-started tutorials available on CodeIgniter website. After going through the tutorials, I can already build a simple web app. The app is called Hack Life which will show a quote randomly retrieved from the database.

So, in this Chinese New Year, I not only got to eat nice food, watch great fireworks, but also learn some new stuff. =D