I am looking for a reliable, relatively simple, inexpensive web based setup for allowing scheduling items checked out for 5-7 days at a time. Kinda like a simple version of what a car rental place might use. Would need to have a “sign in” to keep casual browsers from poking around and track who made a transaction but heavy security is not needed.
Any reccomendations?
Juat a stab but MySQL combined with ASP? Free and sounds like it should work. Exactly what is being checked out? Will it be checked back in? some more details may be necessary.
Charachter costumes for doing special events (Clifford, Franklin, Berenstein Bears, etc) at book fairs/community events.
They would need to be checked back in and preferably would have a method for “reserving” a given costume for a date range.
Where might I find some good basic tutorials/info on MySQL and or ASP that would be applicable to this type of project.
I have Access97 but I really dont know diddle about exporting access projects to the web (although I think there is a way IIRC)
<<bump>>
anyone else have any ideas?
It’s not that your question is being ignored, but that there are so many possible answers. The system you describe would be fairly simple to implement in any programming language, but it’s not entirely clear whether you’re looking for a way to develop this yourself or looking for an existing system to reuse.
Here are a few different methods for providing dynamic web page generation:
ASP - Microsoft Active server pages, can be written in VBScript, Perlscript, JavaScript, etc. Code is intermixed with HTML within each page and executed on the server to provide dynamic pages. Generally run on Microsoft IIS server, but there are engines to run it on Apache, et al.
PHP - functionally equivalent to ASP, intermixes code with content on a page. Syntax is much like Perl. Open-source, and can be hosted on a variety of servers.
Java JSP - another functional equivalent of ASP, intermixes Java code with content on a page.
Java Servlet - server-side executables separate from content pages. Much like CGIs but with many advantages such as multi-threaded execution rather than multiple instantiation.
CGI - an executable written in almost any language can be run by the server to provide content. The vast majority of CGI apps are written in Perl, but many are written in C/C++ or various legacy languages.
There are a lot more minor-league systems like Cold Fusion and heitml that provide some or all of the functionality described above.
Any of these can tie to a server-side database to provide the data you need to maintain. Typical databases would be:
mySQL - open source, fast, and stable. Admin tools not quite as pretty or user-friendly as some proprietary systems.
Microsoft SQLServer - large, robust, expensive.
Oracle - larger, more robust, more expensive.
Lots more like Microsoft Access (not suitable for anything but very small-scale apps or prototyping), PostgreSQL, etc.
The pros and cons of both server-side code choice and database flavor is the stuff holy wars are made of. You’re unlikely to find much objective opinion since the people saying good things about one system may be completely uninformed about the others.
For your project, you should pick a programming environment in which you already have skills or can learn in easily. I’d recommend either ASP or PHP because the syntax is simple to understand, tutorials are abundant, and server platforms are readily available for both development on your own machine and production hosting. If you have existing programming skills, pick a system that reuses those unless this project is specifically aimed at broadening your expertise.
If you have no programming ability and don’t want any, then I guess you’re looking for an existing system that you can reuse. There are lots of places that make that kind of code available. Do you have an existing server you intend to host on so you could at least limit the choices by platform, or are you completely open?