1. Totally New – former user of Microsoft Access pursues PHP & MySQL

[jer_merrill]

1. Totally New – former user of Microsoft Access
   pursues PHP & MySQL
2. I have used Access extensively – however wish to place my data base activity on the internet. I don’t wish to use Access.
   Have explored info. about other methods and have settled on PHP & MySQL for database capture and reporting.
3. See sample of system data capture screens I am going to publish on the internet. I created this Access application using the tools that are supplied with Access. The tools were functions that I applied to the various data cells within each data file. Examples of some functions for cells were: length; date; currency; weights; measures; bold type; size; choice box; menu and report choices etc.
   Similar to choices offered in Microsoft Office Excell data sheets.
4. To help understand my plight here is a link to what I am talking about. What you see might not make any sense. The data in some text in cells might look like total gibberish [page 7] i.e. [8b would cause typesetting program to output 8 point bold typeface.
   Trust me. It’s valid text to accomplish an end result called typesetting. (Publishing horse directories.) http://gochipmunk.com/TMS-12-08-04-Wed_1_.pdf
   I want to create code and manage features from a central web page and not have several versions of the program installed in various sales locations.
5. Using Microsoft Access – the first step was to create data files by assigning a name to a cell and the size (length) of data the cell was to capture. After assigning names and lengths for: Name, Address, City, St, Zip, County, C-phone, L-phone I advanced to creating a capture form by arranging these cell names and data fields into a form. (See page 6 – Above link.) No code was written by me. Somehow magically it was produced by Access and stored somewhere I never discovered. All I know it worked and did what I wanted it to do. I would take the input data, create reports and import that data into a typesetting program called Quark Xpress which composes paginated pages of typesetting.
6. My FIRST Question: Is there an application program that I could use to perform this function of creating a data file and at the same time the PHP code would be generated so a person could also modify or add to the PHP code to perform other specific functions? This data would be captured and stored into MySQL database files.
7. My Second Question: Can anyone recommend a 3rd. party report generator that would work with – extract data from MySQL data files?. I want to have formatting capabilities to create print ready reports. i.e. headings, footings, page numbers etc.
8. At present I do NOT have a web page that is equipped with Unix or Linux and MySQL. I want to develop this application on my own XP machine. I understand from reading different things published on the web that PHP will run under WINDOWS XP and MySQL will operate within Windows XP.
9. My Third Question: Where do I go to download PHP5 plus MySQL and any other items that are required to make it possible for me to accomplish this feat.

thanks,
madisonpete

[NogDog]

6: I believe Dreamweaver has some support for this, but you'll need to check with the DW experts to be sure. I also know that Borland has a rapid development GUI-based IDE that can do this.

8-9: For installing/testing on a PC, there are all-in-one installers such as WampServer (WAMP) and XAMPP. And of course you can get the source/binaries directly from www.php.net and www.mysql.com, and then follow their installation instructions (and visit this forum's Installation forum).