Web served dB

[Anon]

Hi,
I have very limited time to make some initial decisions, begin development and get an online dB going. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
The application will see web pages served for a product with supporting specification data and jpgs. Within the page will be hyperlinks to related products or components.
To date I have toyed with MS Access and their data access page technology. Which is begining to work but in my view has limited documentation and support.
I can imagine what I want to do is not new. Its been done for years for online catalogues.
I can develop on either Win32 or Linux. I would prefer if the development used Linux that it could be easily ported to SCO Unix.
Any suggestions welcome.

[[deleted]]

Go with linux.
For a quick start with databases, use MySQL. Then move to postgres as soon as possible (more complex, but a_lot_ better than MySQL).

Forget windows as much as possible. I use it only because windows has editplus; a frantically fast little text editor. The rest is linux/solaris.
Definately do NOT use MS-Access as a database, because it's really just a glorified flatfile thing.

A combination of PHP+apache+mysql/postgress can be installed on nearly every platform, and certainly allmost every flavour of unix.

If you or your company have serious cash, you could look at Informix.
They have a 'web datablade' which looks and works a bit like coldfusion, but
it's all happening inside the database (modules, no parsers, it's all inside the D😎 which makes it very fast.
You can write queries etc inside the html code and have it parsed on the fly by the database engine. Very simple and fast.

Otherwise, go for PHP. Cheap fast and easy to use.

[Anon]

Thanks for your reply Vincent.
Does PHP support data drill down easily?
I'd like to generate pages which have related links listed for users to navigate thru the complete catalogue quickly.
I'd like to relate the products in the dB and then have the hyperlinks which represent those relationships generated automatically?
This way the links are not hard-coded.
Perhaps I should be looking at a development product like cold fusion or crystal reports to facilitate this more readily.
I've had a look at Informix and that might be overkill for this in-house application.

[[deleted]]

You are thinking too much like Microsoft.

Drilldown is not a feature, it's a method of getting data.
It's a simple recursive function thet reads data from the database.
PHP is not drag-and-drop, and not point-and-click.

PHP is hands-on, knee-deep in sourcecode.
Wind... win... dang, I can't say the word... anyway, 'it' is point and click, drag-and-drop, pray-for-acceptable-performance.

[Anon]

thanks for your feedback once again Vincent.
I'm happy to use any terminology as long as we can understand each other.
I am thinking in terms of the service I wish to provide the end-user. That is, the means to navigate a product catalogue with hyperlinks.
If thats thinking too much like Microsoft, then I dont apologise for that.
The question I have for this forum is, can PHP together with a database provide me with the means to achieve my goal?
If so, where can I go to learn how to do it and perhaps look at some examples.
I've looked all over this site and so far I've yet to see 'the way'.

[[deleted]]

There's nothing PHP can't do, but you'll have to write scripts to do it.
There's no wizerd like in MS's products.

PHPbuilder.com is a very good example that navigation using database-data
is possible.

It's not even that difficult to do once you have a clear plan of what you want to do.
After all, a link is just some printed text. In your case you'd get the text from a database and which text you get depends on which 'category' the user is currently in.

What you'll need is a tree-like category structure with items, parents and grandparents.

There was a post about this a few days ago, have a search in the forum.

[Anon]

ok, thanks Vincent.
I've bought a book and on the road to php.
cheers.