Building your first dynamic web application

This is the repository of the application developed during a workshop conducted on 15 October 2017 by IMG at IIT Roorkee.

Application developed: Pastebin clone

The main objective of the workshop was to develop a dynamic application in a limited time of 3 hours. Pastebin is one of the useful applications that developers use and making a basic working clone is easy.

Technologies used (LAMP, WAMP or MAMP)

• PHP
• Apache
• MySQL

Database table design

+---------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field         | Type            | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+---------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id            | int(6) unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| paste_data    | text            | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| unique_string | char(7)         | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
+---------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Reading material

• HTML, CSS and JS

  • https://www.w3schools.com/

• PHP

  • https://www.w3schools.com/php/ (Basics of PHP)
  • https://github.com/ziadoz/awesome-php (Curated list of all the necessary resources, can be checked after mastering the basics)

• Apache

  • http://howtoubuntu.org/how-to-install-lamp-on-ubuntu (LAMP)
  • http://www.wampserver.com/en/ (WAMP for Window users)

• MySQL

  • https://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp (SQL)
  • https://www.tutorialspoint.com/mysql/ (MySQL)
  • https://www.w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_intro.asp (MySQL + PHP)

Step by step development

The commit history can be checked out to get the insights of the different stages of development. Can be seen here

Setup

Detailed guidelines for setting up the project can be viewed at SETUP.md

Additional features that can be added to this project

• Make your app pretty using CSS (https://www.w3schools.com/css/)
• Prevent SQL Injection and XSS attacks (https://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_injection.asp)
• Add user signup and login features
  • Username/Email and Password based login with a Remember Me button
  • Change password feature
  • Save the password as a hash (https://crackstation.net/hashing-security.htm)
• Frontend and backend validations for user signup
  • https://www.w3schools.com/php/php_form_validation.asp
  • https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_validation.asp
• Show all the pastes of a particular user
• Being able to edit a paste (Add authentication)
• Make pastes public, private, and visible to certain users (Add flags)
• Use sessions (https://www.w3schools.com/php/php_sessions.asp)
• Use cookies (https://www.w3schools.com/php/php_cookies.asp)
• Support pastebin code formatting (There are various code formatters available)
• Provide an option to login with facebook, google and github (Find a way to do it)
• Host your app somewhere so that people can see your app live in action and a lot more.

Further queries

Feel free to open issues if facing problems with the code written. IMG is always there to help.