Help! Anyone know about Mac?

michaelj90046

Hi everyone,
I hope this isn't a terribly stupid question...but I have a new client whose site is hosted on a Mac server. They're using a really simple form to collect customer info, then inputting it by hand into an Excel database. Of course, they want a way to automate this process, but I'm pretty clueless about Macs and databases. Any suggestions? Thanks so much!!
Michael

brandonschnell

take a look at using lasso and a db backend such as filemaker pro.

http://www.blueworld.com/blueworld/products/

Anon

The guy who built our site, which has a Mac image server, has developed a MacSQL application that allows you to do MySQL on a mac. I don't know much about it, but it seems to work.
Go to http://www.rtlabs.com to check it out.

reagent

I know for a fact that lasso costs $$, so I doubt that they would want to fork out over $1k for a solution. I'm not sure how much filemaker pro is, but I bet it's not free. What is the reason for hosting this on a mac? If this is a hosting provider, you could probably switch systems and go w/ unix or at worst windows 🙁

If there is some pressing need to use a mac, than this probably isn't a possibility and they may want to pay for some scripting engine.

hth
p.

brandonschnell

if they've got the spare mac hardware and don't want to host it somewhere else, do what i did. slap linuxppc (or yellowdog) on a box, then compile mysql & php.

craigh

OK - a couple points. what mac? if it is a G3 or better, upgrade to OSX and then you can build Apache, MySQl, and PHP all in it and go from there. If not, there are otehr options. FileMaker Pro is an EXCELLENT database. AppleScript works well for automating things and you can also use MacPerl if you like Perl.

Excel is not a database application. It is a spreadsheet. While they share some common things, they are not the same and can function quite differently. email me if you think I can help further.