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Posted: **Thu Jun 17, 2004 10:46 pm**

I would like to put a website to market a mates business. The goal of the site is to accelerate his business by dramatically increasing his customer base. The site needs to be low maintenance but of high yield potential.

I already know basic HTML and am learning CSS. I know a little on hosting the site but nothing of server side information handling and security. Could someone direct me to relevant articles or keyword searches that will be of use? A general overview of what I would need to learn would be greatly appreciated.

I welcome anybody's thoughts, particularly those already passionate about or currently in the web-designing field.

Thanks in advance

Josh

Posted: **Fri Jun 18, 2004 7:58 am**

Well first before you get into articles or tutorials you need to know what server-side programming language you're going to use.

The 3 major contenders are:

PHP
JSP
ASP

The first, php, is a fast, easy to use and learn language that comes with built in support for MySQL RDBMS (Relational Database Management System which is just a fancy word for today's databases.)
MySQL is fast, but isn't designed for very large sites (stuff like amazon or yahoo etc).
Chances are you buddy's site would run fine on MySQL, so don't worry about that.
PHP is embedded in HTML which makes it pretty damned easy to go between dynamic and static content.

PHP will run on most servers (Apache, IIS etc) so hosting is easy to find and relatively cheap.

PHP & MySQL are also free, so that's another plus.
One problem with PHP though is your limited # of db's to choose from. It's tough to get connection support for anything other than MySQL, PostGre SQL or Oracle.

Next we jave JSP. Java's solution to ASP.
It's free, and theres a number of servers that run it (Apache Tomcat, JBOSS).
JSP can be a bit complicated and tougher to learn, but it's far more powerful and can do a lot more than php. You can also use JSP & Java together. JSP can be a 'handler' for Java servlets which really opens up the door.
JSP can connect to just about every RDBMS out there. There's tons of JDBC drivers out there and almost all of em are free.
Another advantage with JSP & Java is it's OOP support that PHP doesn't have.

As far as ASP's concerned, I've never used it but lot of people swear by it. It's similar to JSP in a number of ways. You can also write scripts for it in a number of languages. I'm not sure which databases it supports, but I imagine it's go a number of driver classes available for it like JSP.

Unfortunately, ASP IS a MS product, so you're VERY limited on hosting choices. ASP is not free, and has to be running on a windows box. So, hosting fees for ASP sites are generally higher than most.

I'm sure other people will have more info, but this is just my little suggestion for ya.

IMO PHP is the way to go if you're just starting out.
It's easier to get into and more flexible than the other two.

Best of luck.

Posted: **Fri Jun 18, 2004 2:09 pm**

ASP does run on Linux: ChiliSoft! ASP, which used to be free. Now it costs about $350.

I used to swear by ASP. Since it's a Microsoft IIS product, you can write in either VBScript or JScript, because the real server code is in not in the language parser but in the COM objects your script manipulates to do its work. Unfortunately, that also means it's slow as hell compared to PHP, Perl, etc. But if you're at all familiar with VB you'll love ASP. Here's what ASP code looks like:

Code: Select all

<html>
<head>
<title>ASP Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<%
Dim i
For i = 0 To 10 Step 2
  Response.Write "i = " & i & "<br>"
Next
%>
</body>
</html>

This code will print a list of numbers from 0 to 10, skipping all the odd numbers. It declares a variable i, loops from 0 to 10 counting by 2's, and every time it loops it calls the Write method of the Response object, passing it "i = whatever<br>", which is sent to your web browser as regular HTML. This object-oriented setup, however, is what causes ASP to be so slow.

PHP is pretty much the same. Here's how the same thing would be done in PHP:

Code: Select all

<html>
<head>
<title>ASP Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
for($i = 0; $i <= 10; $i += 2)
  echo "i=$i<br>";
?>
</body>
</html>

See how much smaller it is? PHP is much more efficient like that. ASP is simpler to understand for the beginner, unless you've had some experience with C and then PHP is a breeze. The blessing and curse of PHP is that it's not designed as modularly so it's not as slow, but also not as extensible (you usually compile PHP yourself, and at that time determine what features you want to add to or subtract from PHP).

Go with PHP. It's the most popular server-side scripting language on the web. I also prefer MySQL, but it doesn't have some of the advanced RDBMS features that other databases do (foreign keys, etc). Seeing as MySQL is supposed to one day compete with the likes of MS SQL Server and Oracle, that should change soon, and MySQL is excellent for most database work anyway.

Posted: **Fri Jun 18, 2004 11:18 pm**

I failed to mention this site also needs to be able to process credit card information. Has anyone had any experience in setting up similar ventures?

Posted: **Fri Jun 18, 2004 11:47 pm**

just build it on the Meva engine (Google it)

Talk to JBomB about meva also.

Posted: **Sat Jun 19, 2004 11:24 am**

It's Miva, not Meva.

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