Web 2.0, Social, and My foray into PHP and MySQL

PHP, MySQL, SOcial Networking and the Web 2.0 Experience



I graduated with a Bachelors degree in microbiology from the greatest university in my country: Obafemi Awolowo University and because i had an inkling for compiters and computing, i had even completed a substantial part of my Oracle Certification Programme by the time i graduated.

I got my first interests in web development a year or two before my freshman year, back when heavy Flash enabled websites, table styling were the order of the day and facebook was probably still wearing diapers, Simply put: Web 1.0. Then, web pages were strictly HTML and you updated page contents manually on a regular basis.

With Web 2.0 however came social networking, a more social web, database-driven websites and a host of advanced features. Being an Oracle Database Administrator, i knew about displaying database results in HTML and although i never really bothered myself with the underlying framework that made it work, it turned out that all database driven websites used one Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) or the other (and mind you, the internet runs on Oracle). But then it turns out Oracle is expensive to run on a web server and unless you are probably deploying a critical mission centre or a large corporate data network, Oracle ain't really the choice for you which brings us to the need for something average websites can run on without going broke in a few hours, and there it is: MySQL.

MySQL has been the database of choice for inexpensive websites that need to use a database and it goes quite hand in hand with PHP and even though it is not as robust and effective as Oracle, it's a very good cost effective option. Because it is open-source, it's quite cheap and developments come on a regular basis.
Now, i never thought (well with my Oracle Certification) that i'll ever work on anything as cheap as MySQL (Dont mind me, Oracle Certified guys are usually a bit proud). But with my entry into web development it turns out that everybody wants to enjoy the Web 2.0 experience with you getting requests for either a blog, a forum or some lil social networking thing from customers.

So it turns out that to stay alive in this business, my ignorance of "that underlying framework" has to be overcome and my ego has to be put aside. Started PHP classes a while ago and apart from the heavy scripting jobs, it's been quite easy hosting blogs, setting up this social network or the other and even news sites.