I’m currently working on a small internal web app for our research lab at Cytion, and I’m using PHP to handle and display biological data — specifically related to cell lines like MDA-MB-231.
I’m looking for best practices when it comes to securely managing and retrieving scientific metadata (e.g., growth conditions, assay results, etc.) using PHP and MySQL. Has anyone here worked on similar scientific or medical data management projects using PHP?
Also, any advice on libraries or frameworks that support clean data visualization would be much appreciated.
Well, I’m not sure what sort of visualization you’re looking to do, but that would probably be more Javascript’s ballpark than PHP’s. PHP would deliver the data to the client layer; the front end trio (HTML, Javascript, CSS) then handle the presentation.
Securely fetching data from a database with PHP is simple enough - PHP is executed at the Server end of a request. So the connection between PHP and the database is a Server-to-Server connection that the user should never see.
Securing access to your output is a different kettle of fish, and is relatively data-agnostic - there exist myriad methods of securing login systems and credentials. You’d need to elaborate further on what sort of credential system you’re looking to implement if you want actionable recommendations.
Yes, for sensitive scientific data, use PDO with prepared statements for security. For visualization, check out Chart.js or Google Charts—they’re clean and work great with PHP+MySQL.