Wall D. Multi-Tier Application Programming with PHP. Practical Guide for Architects and Programmers

Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004. — 278 p.
ISBN: 978-0127323503.This book aspires to replace trust in commercial products with reliance on open-source software and your own ingenuity. We've all been in a situation in which a customer wants to solve some complicated information-services problem without spending much money. Maybe the project is a oneoff demonstration that's unlikely to lead to much of a sale. Maybe it's a proof-of-concept project that may never get real funding. Maybe, and this isn't uncommon at all, the customer is just cheap and wants a real, highly capable, production solution for the absolute least amount of money possible. The application typically is feature rich, with a substantial data model backing it up. It may be something like a travel reservation system, a catalog, a data warehouse full of scientific of business data, or, as is modeled in several chapters of this book, an accounting system. These are the sorts of applications for which Microsoft touts the .NET Framework and Sun Microsystems sells Enterprise Java. Those are extraordinarily capable development environments. They are also more or less proprietary, and dependent on expensive software licenses.