PHP and MySQL have become a serious and commercially viable system with which to develop web applications. With the relase of PHP 5, J2EE developers, in particular, are starting to take a second look at PHP. And while there are many books on the makret that describe PHP language syntax, there are very few that fully describe web application development with PHP and related technologies. This book describes the complete web application development lifecycle, from planning the application to designing the user interface to building in robust security. And since web applications serve the entire world, often neglected globalization issues are treated in detail. Though MySQL is used throughout the examples, Part IV also contains examples of building applications on top of both Oracle and PostgresSQL, two popular alternatives to MySQL for use in mission-critical systems.