I installed WAMP, but had problems because I'd also tried to install Apache and PHP5 separately but ran into issues trying to get them to work together. I then installed WAMP but ran into trouble because I didn't first uninstall the separate Apache and PHP installs.
What I learned was that PHP looks for it's configuration file, PHP.INI by looking in the windows directry, the default directory (which in this case would be Apache's default directory not PHPs) or the directory defined by the environment variable PHPRC.
I also had trouble extending the WAMP version of PHP to include the Cache_Lite module that is required by Buzzwatch but that was a WAMP specific problem and I solved that by replacing the version of PEAR that comes with WAMP with the latest version.
I'm no PHP expert so am not going to post a definitive guide to setting this up. If I were going to set this up on a new machine I would start with WAMP or possibly XAMPPLITE since this gets you past the problem of configuring Apache to integrate PHP - and both these distributions include the SQLite database.
I was disappointed that Apache and PHP weren't easier to get started with, and these concerns were compounded with some of the dependencies in the opening chapter (PHP libxml2 requiring Relax-NG for instance).
I found chapter 1 very difficult to work through, despite having a reasonable amount of Javascript knowledge. Somethings that I think might help others are:
1. Read through the chapter first before trying to get things running, at least to the point where it says 'now install version 2'
2. The database starts unpopulated so you won't get the same behaviour as the illustrations. You won't be able to do replicate anything in the chapter until you've got to the point where you've defined and saved your own share quotes (it would have been nice to include a default SQLite database so that we could hit the ground running!)
3. The YUI interfaces don't work particularly well on my version of Firefox 2.0 - although the examples on the Yahoo site do work as expected. I'm not sure why but I have to move my mouse around different menu options to get the drop downs to trigger.
[Edit: fixed by changing menuBar.
js thus:
Code:
var oMenuBar = new YAHOO.widget.MenuBar(
"menubar",
{ fixedcenter: false, autosubmenudisplay:true, showdelay:250, hidedelay:750, lazyload:true }
);
oMenuBar.render();
]
4. There can be a short delay before your PHP server can fetch data from the Yahoo web services first time so be patient if you think nothing is happening.
5. Using the Firefox Firebug extension is useful for stepping through the Javascript calls - but be sure to use the latest version as it can crash the browser occasionally.
6. Print out the controller.
js file and refer to that rather than the extracts in the book - especially useful with respect to the various callback objects, as the this.callback object is referenced (page 17) but not shown.
7. You are expected to click on the page background where it says '[title]' and '[description]' whereby then you will be able to edit those values for the current stock
8. Use the URL prefix 'http://uk.ichart.yahoo.com/v?s=' in yahoo_chart.php if you want to see UK (LSE) charts as well as US.
9. Don't forget the note about having to change 'watch' to '_watch' to get around problem with Firefox 2.0 in original post.
Getting Started
