macOS Good project to learn MAMP?

SteveyAppleSeed said:

I am trying to come up with some mini projects as suggestions to my professor. I am pushing her to teach the (L/M)AMP stack and would like to hear about some basic, easy projects that would teach a student how to utilize this stack.

Any ideas?

Yes, I did a search on the internet but couldn't find anything that resembled a classroom "exercise."

Hope that makes sense.

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Why teach a specific stack when teaching the general principals of HTML + Javascript + PHP + SQL database theory will help no matter what software you use on any platform for the rest of existence (or at least until something better comes along than PHP, HTTP Servers and relational databases).

Even better would be to not teach PHP at all and stick to something like Python or Java for web development.

As for a classroom exercise how about an airline flight booking application? I It doesn't have to be complex, just complex enough to give a practical element to what is taught in class.

Cromulent said:

Even better would be to not teach PHP at all and stick to something like Python or Java for web development.

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Teach programming not a language. In the long run it does not matter what language you decide to get proficient at, a class should teach the basics of all of them then get the students to write a website in two different languages(One for Admin and one for the front end).

Teaching one language only encourages students to be narrow minded about there projects and to think that the language they were taught is the be all and end all.

A good classroom project would be a Ecommerce site. It gives enough flexibility for students to add extra bells and whistles without becoming too complex and time consuming.

babyjenniferLB said:

Teaching one language only encourages students to be narrow minded about there projects and to think that the language they were taught is the be all and end all.

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Or it teaches them that the methodologies associated with a particular language are the right way to go. Thus one should make every effort to avoid PHP in an academic setting.

The author of PHP himself has come out stating it was written as a hodgepodge of functions to solve a problem. It certainly was not written to demonstrate good practice, or indeed any practice at all.

Use it once you know how to program not when you are learning, but I would imagine that once you have used other languages that you would wish to avoid PHP anyway. PHP is pretty much the new BASIC.

A good project would be a web-based message forum. Kind of like a mini-phpBB or VBulletin.

You can get a simple version running in a couple days if you go straight at it, or a few weeks in a classroom setting. You'll learn about database design, sanitize input fields, searching/sorting/displaying data...

The students can also extend it, adding things such as PM's, different search functions, accepting image uploads, etc etc. I have a very basic one that I wrote when I first played around with PHP that I could post up.



An example of viewing a thread.

Cromulent said:

Or it teaches them that the methodologies associated with a particular language are the right way to go. Thus one should make every effort to avoid PHP in an academic setting.

The author of PHP himself has come out stating it was written as a hodgepodge of functions to solve a problem. It certainly was not written to demonstrate good practice, or indeed any practice at all.

Use it once you know how to program not when you are learning, but I would imagine that once you have used other languages that you would wish to avoid PHP anyway. PHP is pretty much the new BASIC.

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It would be best to avoid teaching PHP that is indeed true(Well at least the way it is taught in university with not even a look in on objects and not even basic class design.). Though the alternative is often worse by far as I have seen Coldfusion being taught.

Though it still comes down to my original statement, programming should be taught not the language. I believe something like Pascal would teach good programming practices.

babyjenniferLB said:

Though it still comes down to my original statement, programming should be taught not the language. I believe something like Pascal would teach good programming practices.

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Pascal certainly used to be the academic language of choice. Although in recent years it has been replaced with Java.