Booking Application

14zero

Hi,

I am building a booking application online.

The application will handle all bookings that the club used to do through paper as well. The system will replace everything.

Now the issue would be if the connection from the club goes down then they have no way of knowing what the bookings are.

They would be manually making bookings blind not knowing if someone has already booked that time slot.

What solutions are available to this problem that you can think of?

I dont think running it from their premisis is an option due to cost.

Any help would be appreciated

Brendon

Pig

cost?

PHP = free
apache = free
MySQL = free
cheap @$$ computer that only has to run a server and give an interface: $400

You could even go less on the computer. You can easily find people with an old pII and 64MB of RAM that they want to unload. If this is all you are doing, then who cares?

You can make it so that the server stuff automatically loads on start up, so all they have to do is turn it on.

Anyway, there is no guarenteed 100% uptime. Considering that most hosting companies schedule their updates for the wee hours of the morning, they would be affected the worst (assuming they are making on-the-spot scheduling).

steadyguy

And you could use OpenBSD for the OS ... Free, probably the most secure on the planet, and runs rocksteady on anything newer than an 8088.

tekky

or do flatfile local storage updates every X minutes.... just have to come up with an effective storage method.... '#' delimited may work for you... if PHP and a writeini function (to creat ini files for date storage) I would suggest using those....

14zero

Originally posted by Pig
cost?

PHP = free
apache = free
MySQL = free
cheap @$$ computer that only has to run a server and give an interface: $400

You could even go less on the computer. You can easily find people with an old pII and 64MB of RAM that they want to unload. If this is all you are doing, then who cares?

You can make it so that the server stuff automatically loads on start up, so all they have to do is turn it on.

Anyway, there is no guarenteed 100% uptime. Considering that most hosting companies schedule their updates for the wee hours of the morning, they would be affected the worst (assuming they are making on-the-spot scheduling).

A)You are right that it isn't that expensive, a concern is bandwidth cost as they would be hosting and would need a decent connection. Is this what you meant ??

😎 Server Security is my other concern, Its not something I have really had to do. I have set up server environments but ensuring they can't get hacked worries me. Is this as hard as it seems??

14zero

Originally posted by tekky
or do flatfile local storage updates every X minutes.... just have to come up with an effective storage method.... '#' delimited may work for you... if PHP and a writeini function (to creat ini files for date storage) I would suggest using those....

This sounds a little safer to me for my area of competency,

Although I am still a little hazy on what I would do to get this working, do you know anywhere I could get more information on this or can you post a little more detail if not too much trouble.

Thankyou for your replies, they are very helpful

Pig

If you run it locally, there is NO bandwidth, and no worries about server vulnerability. Just set up the machine as a local install. Most people have done this with their own computer to do testing.

14zero

Originally posted by Pig
If you run it locally, there is NO bandwidth, and no worries about server vulnerability. Just set up the machine as a local install. Most people have done this with their own computer to do testing.

Sorry I may have not explained properly ( I did try before you execute me)

External web users also need to be able to make bookings, thus being my main concern

tekky

as far as flat files go....

read up on the file functions.... on www.php.net....
implode() and explode() and I tihnk the file functions are like fwrite() and fopen() fclose() fread()...

where are you located, I can maybe hook you up with someone to help secure the server if you do want to go the local server route... I got contacts in several states, that I've known for 5-15years that work almost explicitly with Unix environments

steadyguy

And as for security ... read some of the testimonials on the OpenBSD site ... I especially like the one by a very experienced developer who says he'd let a novice intern install it 'out of the box' and proceed to use it ...

14zero

Originally posted by tekky
as far as flat files go....

read up on the file functions.... on www.php.net....
implode() and explode() and I tihnk the file functions are like fwrite() and fopen() fclose() fread()...

where are you located, I can maybe hook you up with someone to help secure the server if you do want to go the local server route... I got contacts in several states, that I've known for 5-15years that work almost explicitly with Unix environments

Im in Australia, The Open BSD sounds like a good option though.

Thanks for your infomation above, is it reasonable to get the local server to request a mysql dump from the remote server and update the local server ??

14zero

Originally posted by steadyguy
And as for security ... read some of the testimonials on the OpenBSD site ... I especially like the one by a very experienced developer who says he'd let a novice intern install it 'out of the box' and proceed to use it ...

Sounds good, what I am thinking now is that the hosted external site can request the mysql information form the local machine when doing bookings. This would then limit the amount of bandwidth required to keep the main external site running smoothly and also ensure that the local data is always intact.

Do you think that connecting to the local myslq server from the remote host to request and update information would work off the default setup of BSD??

I just want to avoid cornering myself into an option that I can't get out of.

tekky

should be fine.... querying remotely to the local machine for the dbase info....

as far as practial dumping database result to a txt file, maybe not the MOST practical solution but it wouldnt be hard to do either....

and what part of Oz? Syd, Melb?

14zero

Originally posted by tekky
should be fine.... querying remotely to the local machine for the dbase info....

as far as practial dumping database result to a txt file, maybe not the MOST practical solution but it wouldnt be hard to do either....

and what part of Oz? Syd, Melb?

Im on the Gold Coast 1 hr south of Brisbane