Tech Novice Tools | About Cerebro

"Welcome, Professor..."

Well, our server isn't quite that interactive!

Being the Marvel fans that we are, it was fun to think of our interactions with our database as an exchange with a hyper-intelligent machine that can deliver information quickly when we formulate the right requests.

In a nutshell, TNT has access to an online database where we have stored information that certain apps need to 'run.' The database is housed in a mySQL platform.

The database is analogous to a 'book' in Excel and is a collection of 'tables' which are analogous to sheets in an Excel workbook. Information is obtained from the database by forming 'queries' which are processed by PHP that ultimately deliver a package of data that is unravelled by PHP to the browser and arranged on the webpage that initially made the request.

Whew! See why we just think of it as 'Cerebro'?!

About Cerebro

cerebro

Cerebro is our whimsical visualizaton of how we interact with an online database at TNT. A connection to the database requires:

A host (place where stuff is stored)
A user (like Xavier above...someone wanting to use the database)
A password (gotta have permission to use data, right?)
A database (the actual repository of the information)

A link is formed using these ingredients that is like making a connection to a big company in a phone call: The call goes through and you wait for your call to be picked up by someone in the company. The 'link' command looks like this:

$link = mysqli_connect($host, $user, $pw, $dbase);

Getting this connection to work can be tricky! Here are the current apps that utilize the power of Cerebro to supply/manipulate/store/receive data:

Random Roster App