I need to display information from an SQL database which resides on a server, to a remote webworks mobile device. I am extremely new to passing information from a server so bear with me. My normal understanding is that I would have an HTML file that accesses a php script which then itself connects to the database and displays the information.
However, in webworks the HTML/Javascript files reside on the device and are separated from any php file so I need a method to communicate to get the data from the database. I have looked through JSON and read all the tutorials on w3schools and I understand the syntax but I don’t understand how to use it. How could it connect to a database? My aim is to simply display the table entries on a mobile device app running HTML5 webworks. Again I am very new to this so any explanation would be very helpful.
Chances are, you should get a book. This is not something that can be explained in detail in a short answer on this site.
in summary however, you can either
1) send requests to your php script by submitting a form on an html page, which will load a new page filled with whatever PHP sends back. in this case you do not need to use JSON at all as PHP would be returning a full html page.
2) you can use AJAX. AJAX is a javascript method of sending requests to the server (PHP), and getting a response without ever loading a new page. you would use AJAX to send a request to the php page, the php page would access the database and send back a response, the javascript would then take the response and do whatever it needs with it. the response data is usually formatted in a JSON format, because PHP can easily create JSON, and javascript can easily decode JSON once it receives it as a response. to make using AJAX simpler, you may want to look in to using jQuery, a javascript library which can simplify the process.