Core Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL

Chapter 15. User Management

After spending time in the previous chapters looking at what web applications are and how we would go about presenting a user interface, we will now turn to the users themselves. It is important to understand how they interact with our application, how (and when) to distinguish them from visitors, and how to protect them from other malicious visitors.

In this chapter, we will

• Discuss the way in which users connect to our web application

• Learn how we can make a stateless protocol, such as HTTP, track users

• Think about where and when we want to validate users before letting them proceed

• Think about protecting users from malicious users