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phpMyAdmin?

How would you know which md5 hash was correct? They are listed in http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php which is also hosted by sourceforge.

It's not PHP that's the problem here, it's the specific software package phpMyAdmin. It's software that should never be deployed on an Internet-facing computer because of its security problems: about a third of the malicious traffic on my webserver is people probing for phpMyAdmin installations.

This. phpMyAdmin has security problems. However, this was likely an authentication breach.

It doesn't matter that what software they use; the fact they have complete database management online, makes it a lot easier for user details to be taken.

It's not PHP that's the problem here, it's the specific software package phpMyAdmin. It's software that should never be deployed on an Internet-facing computer because of its security problems: about a third of the malicious traffic on my webserver is people probing for phpMyAdmin installations.

Enderandrew, thanks for your comment - it's exactly as you write: We don't believe there will be huge code improvements within 24 hours - that's what the regular release processes are for. However, we believe FLOSS development needs more attention by the public (=everyone who doesn't read /.) Thus we'll try to get mass media (TV, news papers etc) to the event and document the Hackontest session and thus inform mortal software users that there are alternatives for their MS et al. products.

As second effect we expect to motivate FLOSS users to file their feature requests on the platform so developers get to know what people want. It's sort of addressing end user wishes with lot of demand (And yes, this concept is copied from Dell Ideastorm and Ubuntu Brainstorm - but now made available for all open source projects) Of course we are aware that there are roadmaps with future functionality enhancements. In this case it's even easier for developers to participate in the competition: Just file the features you've planned to implement anyway and maybe win a trip to Switzerland and some pocket money.

A last comment by the (unpaid) organizers: The first Hackontest is a trial - if many people participate in the selection process, file feature requests and rate them, if many skilled developers agree to implement features and show up at the event and if FLOSS communities support Hackontest overall (e.g. such as phpMyAdmin), then it's a success (and will be hopefully repeated next year). If not, we're sorry for the distortion we've created and won't bother you again with silly ideas ;)

Thanks for helping to make more marketing for great FLOSS products and participating on www.hackontest.org!

Probably because people in the open source world write their own GUIs specifically for the task at hand in whatever language they are comfortable. I write my own PHP GUIs for MySQL databases all the time. If you're talking about GUI admin interfaces you may want to check out phpMyAdmin or HeidiSQL.

The answer to every one of your questions there is yes, except for the printable schema of tables

It even does that. From the documentation:

Since release 2.3.0 you can have phpMyAdmin create PDF pages showing the relations between your tables

See http://www.phpmyadmin.net/documentation/

JP

Hmm... well, the main advantage of LAMP is that the various pieces Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP work really really well with each other. On the development tools side, there isn't anything free that matches Visual Studio in sheer development speed (I use vim myself), but I've heard good things about PHP Eclipse. On the database side, PHPMyAdmin beats everything else I've ever used, open source and commercial. If you're really interested in rapid development and programming ease, I'd suggest looking into Ruby on Rails.

However, the real wealth of tools come in the form of the applications that are built on top of the LAMP stack, including blogging tools and Content Management Systems which make creating and maintaining a website infinitely easier.

I'm not sure about reporting specifically, but phpMyAdmin is the way to go for a generic MySQL front end.

This is slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if anyone is aware of any generic web-frontends for MySQL?

How about http://www.phpmyadmin.net/?

PHP-based applications can be great if designed by good programmers.

For proof, just look at some of the projects using PHP: Mantis Bug Tracker, PHPMyAdmin, MediaWiki (Wikipedia), several top discussion boards, Friendster, reportedly apps by Yahoo, and countless others.

These are HIGH-QUALITY web applications. Of course, great things can be done with other platforms, but it's nonsense to slam PHP because "it's so easy that non-programmers produce a lot of crap code with it". The proof that it's worthy is in the *best* apps that are produced, not the worst ones!

MySQL's client libraries are appauling. MyODBC, their ODBC connector, has been one big fuckup after another for the past 2 years.

The horrible JDBC support with MySQL was the final straw for me, and what pushed me to PostgreSQL for all of my new database backed applications. The PostgreSQL JDBC drivers work really well, especially in the presence of Unicode text data. I've heard that more recent MySQL releases have better handling for this, but it's too late for me.

Has anyone checked out the GUI admin tools? These are also a long chain of distasters.

Amen. Whenever I've used MySQL the second thing I install is phpMyAdmin. It just works, and it just works well.

phpMyAdmin is great for those of us working with PHP.

MySQL installation is pretty brainless. Unpack the archive, tweak the config file, start it up, and create your users.

It's pretty fast, very stable, and has an excellent front-end available. Basically, it does the job, and it does it well. There are certain advanced DB tasks that you might need a more robust SQL implementation for, but for general purpose DB work, there's really not much reason to use anything else.

PostgreSQL is awesome, but last time I set it up, it was definately more work than MySQL.

Yes, it does, try phpMyAdmin

Well if by "client-side" you mean stand alone (where stand-alone means still requires the php interpreter) applications that don't run on a webserver, the answer is yes. You can even make GUIs using PHP-GTK.

As for "web based front-ends to popular database backends" take a look at phpMyAdmin

For the gui DB design tool (partic with apache + php) the option of choice would be PhpMyAdmin.

Your arguments are great but they apply for almost every lanugage I know of.

As for frameworks look at apache. Have you seen how many frameworks it has for java? What about Swing, AWT, SWT etc? Just because they're are lots of frame works doesn't mean it bad.

I agree with your class as a static function library but that's not PHP's fault. C++, Java and Perl have the same problem. When people learn C or VB first and then go to an OO langauge they generally get it wrong.

As for bad projects I sure if you did an "Ask Slashdot" they'd be able to tell you about bad projects C, C++, Lisp, PHP, Java, J2EE, .NET, etc.

As for a standard was of seperating logic from content lots of people say that JSP isn't enough that's why you have stuff like Velocity and all the other framework template engines. If you want a template engine for php the default one is Smarty.

When it come down to it the problem you have with PHP is that it has a lot of newbie programers that use it. Which is good and bad. Try making a simple form in JSP then do the same thing in PHP. PHP is ALOT easier. That doesn't mean it's better but it does mean people with a lower skill can do it. I'm using templates for our internal site and when other people edit it half the time the escape and got back to raw PHP and it's a mess so I fix it up and it's all clean again but they just don't get it untill after I show them then it make sense and they can do it but the next time they can't figure it out so it happens again etc.

Does it mean you get lots of bad half baked libraries YES does it mean you get good libraries and frameworks YES (because more poeple start, so more people get good at it).

If you want to look at good php projects check out:
* Smarty
* Mambo
* Gallery
* phpBB
* JpGraph
* phpMyAdmin

That being said at what level do you move someone from a "HTML + PHP Hack" to a "Web Developer"?

What makes a lanuage "enterprise-ready"? Does an "enterprise" company just have to use it (IE Yahoo and PHP). Or does it have to have faetures?

Where I work we still use PROC and PIC which is a 40 year old language that doesn't have:
* Variable Names - Only numbers!
* Functions - Only GOTO and GO SUB (again numbers no names)
* All variables are global!
* No loops!
* No else - You have to use IF and GOTO!

Yet this is still being used in thousands of companies all over the world! Sure it's legacy but it's enterprise ready and still being used!

So could it be used on a massive site handling 1,000 of concurrent users? Yes, IF IT WAS DESIGNED IN THE RIGHT WAY. It wouldn't be the same design as you'd use for .NET or the same as you'd use for J2EE but it would work. It might not be the best but that depends on the problem. (Same as Clusters vs Grid)

I've ranted engough ... have fun pulling my comments to peices.

i'm no DB admin, and i found phpmyadmin to be incredibly easy and powerful to use. a nice FOSS web-based front end to MySQL.

i think MySQL plus phpmyadmin make a nice friendly - and inherently robust - solution that's easily accessible for the casual user.

Or am I missing the point? Is there any reason to have a thin/thick client over a web client?

PS - I'm downloading the alpha so I can give it a try, so maybe I'll get it ;)

For a straight-up GUI, he might try MySQL Control Center. It's a Qt-based app, so it'll run on Linux and Windows. It lets you build and run queries, manage the server, etc. Even has a "viewer" for images stored as BLOBs.

There's phpMyAdmin as another option. It's web-based, so the "GUI" should run on anything. It does the same kind of stuff that MySQLCC does: lay out tables, create fields, run queries, etc.

On the admin side of things, the upcoming MySQL Administrator looks like it should be very nice. It lets you drop users, tune the DB, monitor the server, etc.

No matter what he winds up using for a GUI, if he uses MySQL, I couldn't recommend the MySQL Cookbook highly enough. It's an amazingly well-written book and very helpful. Every time I find myself with a "what's the best way to do so-and-so..." question, the answer is never more than 30 seconds of page turning away. It's also good for beginners because it's an easy way to find out how to do particular tasks without having to read an entire manual. It'll let a novice user figure out what query to type into MySQLCC, in other words. And the novice user might eventually find out that all the "database theory stuff" isn't all that difficult to learn.

That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure some googling or trolling through freshmeat will yield some GUI apps for PostgreSQL if that's what he's into using.

-B

I look forward to this being released. I've tried several different gui's for working with MySQL but have not found one that does everything I hoped for. Until it's released, I've found combining Dbvisualizer and phpMyAdmin works.

It would be really nice to have the features of both all combined in one nice gui...which is what I hope this will be.

-Pat

As mentioned above it is a good looking interface but you dont want to teach them to depend on a nice looking gui for a database.

If they wont let you use IIS then can I suggest Microweb for a quick eval to see if you want to go the MySQL route. Just download it and burn it to a CD and then you can quickly and painlessly see how MySQL works on any win32 computer.

If you also download the phpMyAdmin and drop it into the cd you can use the graphical web-based frontend and see how simple and powerful it is.

I think you will have a much better educated class as a result of using an open source database. You will help them to see and understand the structure and interelation in tables outside of a slick gui. Then once they understand this then show them how to make their administration tasks easier with a gui.

It was reported on slashdot recently that Apache has a 2/3 market share, I wonder what MySql has for a market share of internet servers.

Obviously someone around here hasn't used phpmyadmin much then .....

Should I have used PostgreSQL?

I have set up a box at work running Redhat 9, Apache, MySQL and PHP. MySQL has proven to work excellently, particularily with Dreamweaver. My problem is that soon in the future, I am going to need transactions that will need triggers and proper database integrity.

The only reason I choose MySQL was this. phpMyAdmin has proven to be the best web-based tool I have ever used for any Unix database system.

I started using PostgreSQL, really I did, but I kept running into problems of things just not working. (I even tried pgMyAdmin, but it just wasn't the same).

It came down to MySQL was more popular and I found it easier to use. I am very busy and don't have a lot of time to spend training myself on the database side of things, but I'd be willing to give PostgreSQL a second chance if I knew it would have some must-have features.

SO... is MySQL good enough for databases in the 500MB and 1000 transactions/day range? Are there any must-have features for PostgreSQL that I should change my mind?

I'm SURE there are other people with this same question... anyone have experience with both want to comment?

I mean, come on, can't the OSS community come up with a SINGLE good-looking graphical frontend for mySQL!?

i have been using web-based phpMyAdmin for a few years now and it's an incredible tool.

it's easy to install, provides relationship views for multiple tables and is being actively developed.

i recommend you give it a look.

• EasyORM - "EasyORM is an object-relational mapping tool for users of PHP and MySQL."
  
  
• DaDaBik - "DaDaBIK is a DataBase Interfaces Kreator". For PHP.
  
  
• Metastorage generator - "Metastorage is an application that is capable of generating persistence layer APIs." Available for PHP.
  
  
• Metakit - "Metakit is an efficient embedded database library with a small footprint. It fills the gap between flat-file, relational, object-oriented, and tree-structured databases, supporting relational joins, serialization, nested structures, and instant schema evolution." C++, Python, Tcl.
  
  
• CodeCharge - Code generator for database web sites.
  
  
• Link from hotscripts PHP database tools section: AppGini - "AppGini creates your MySQL database and all the PHP scripts you need to manage data."
  
  
• eSKUeL, phpMyAdmin - Web-based MySQL administration.
  
  

• Pick an Editor
  My personal favourite is KATE (K Advanced Text Editor). It has PHP highlighting built in (Easier on the eyes), it can have multiple documents open at the same time, and has some advanced features in comparison to WordPad.
• Save it to server directory
  This is located at /var/www/html/
• Pick a browser
  Mandrake comes with several browsers (Start->Networking->WWW) but my personal favourite is Phoenix.
• Test it in the browser Say you saved you PHP script to
  /var/www/html/myscript.php
  then you would be able to access it by typing in the address
  http://localhost/myscript.php
  This should work fine.
• Configuration
  I found the default configuration fine, but I needed to set up users for mysql. To do this I used Webmin, it should be on your Install CD if it isn't installed already. Once you have Webmin installed, in your browser visit:
  https://localhost:10000/
  Log in using your root (Admin) name and password. Then click servers, then click mysql, and there you go. For a frontend to mysql, i would suggest using PHPMyAdmin
• Learning PHP
  For learning PHP, I would suggest buying a book (I used "PHP A Beginners's Guide", published by osborne see here If you just want to use online resources, I personally think PHP's online manual (Just search The PHP Website. I also find PHP Freaks a good site, with lots of tutorials, examples, free scripts and a friendly forum, if you get stuck
• Hopefully that's enough
  If you need more help, feel free to email me. People will also be happy to help you at MandrakeExpert.com and for specific PHP needs, go to the above mentioned PHP Freaks. Hope I was able to help!

They will laugh at you if you teach them MySQL.