Preprocessing data from a database using PHP's PDO class

When working with large applications, data is usually saved in databases rather than static files. This data is retrieved by a server-side language to be served to the client. Further, Highcharts runs only on the client side and is completely independent of the technology that is used at the server side. Hence, any server-side language can be used to dynamically generate HTML and JavaScript to produce charts with Highcharts.

In this section, we will use a database to store data and a server-side language (PHP) to retrieve that data. Due to the vast variety of databases available today, we will use PHP's PDO class that is a consistent interface to access twelve different types of databases; MySQL is one of them. The advantage of using this interface is that we can use the same functions to issue queries and fetch data, regardless of the type of database we use. You can find more about PDO at http://php.net/manual/en/intro.pdo.php.

The...