Hi all, serious question here in reference to my final year project at University.

I am having to produce a website with full database access. The site will have user profiles, forum, news pages.

What i am wondering is what everyone around here thinks about web development, such as, program to develop in, what database method should be used and what language?

At the moment i am mainly focusing on asp and php as the two main possibilities with Dreamwaver CS3. Thinking MySQL will be best for the database. (I believe PHP is the best option, though i am not sure i will be able to use any pre-built modules as i need to project to show my knowledge of learning and additional study)


As i have not had much/if any experience in this type of website development any and all help/advice/suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thank You.

I can recommend Dragonfly, which is what we use for GCC. That is, if you want to use pre-built software.

At any rate, for these things there are a number of possibilities:

• PHP - Probably your best option. Very stable, yet easy to understand. Too many examples on how to do it wrong however. A lot of PHP code out there has been hacked and scripted together. If you want to do it right, be sure to apply proper programming lessons to your code! Preferred database: MySQL, MSSQL, pSQL.
• ASP.NET - Very extensive, and very strict. Harder to learn, but still fairly easy to use. If you have either C# or VB.NET experience, you can directly apply that to ASP.NET. Preferred database: MSSQL / ODBC
• JAVA - Server-side java is what a lot of professional sites use. Don't ask me why, because it's horrid to program in. And what can I say? It's java. Fairly slow, but robust in the end. Preferred database: (Don't even WANT to remember the name of that bloated database package)
• ASP - Regular old ASP is probably the ugliest option of all. Avoid if you can help it! Preferred database: ODBC
• Lesser used options like Ruby on Rails, CGI applications and python also exist. Some of them better than others, but never dabbled in them too much. Do note that CGI applications require YOU to secure nearly everything, and so do a lot of other options!

Hope this allows you to make a choice

I agree with SG, and I am sorry, but I missed this post!

.NET and PHP are very popular in the business world, along with JAVA.

Thanks for the help guys, knew i could count on you.

Will be starting the website soon, just finishing off designs, requirements and research. Will prob be going with dragonfly seems the best option.

Am working on the database designs at the moment and am wondering how best news items and game information ect would be handled. I have the id field, title and description. I am thinking the description will have a reference to a .txt file or something of the like which contains all the information (could be 500words+).

Is this the correct method for doing this, research hasn't yet revealed the answer.

Thanks again.

Are you making a gaming website? Clan? Something else?

If you are using Dragonfly, a lot of those fields are built into the default database (except games).

Thanks for the help guys.

Sorry didnt reply soon but very busy with all this Uni work. Am making a game type site, with possible clan type elment.

Have finally got around to this, way behind and am having some trouble. The dragon fly install says to do this:

"A. Create a new database, for example "dragonfly" using mysqladmin create dragonfly or your web control panel."

I do this in CMD prompt

mysql> create database gametourney;

but get this error in the dragonfly install,
"The connection to the database server failed"

Try again in mysql but get:
"ERROR 1007 <HY000>: Can't create database 'gametourney'; database exists
I have the settings for dragonfly to connect to the SQL server correct i believe but doesnt work still.

I have checked Apache is running and php is working as well.

Thanks for the help.

You can get that message for many things. Have you checked that you are using the correct username and password, that have rights on that database? Is the database server's hostname set correctly? Is it listening on that port? Is that port being blocked by a firewall? Are you allowed to connect to the database from the webserver?

Probably best thing to do is try to connect manually using the mysql prompt:

> mysql --user USERNAME --password --host HOSTNAME --port 1234 gametourney
Password: ....

If that works, you should be able to install dragonfly using that database..

Thanks SG, i got it all working now. Had to uninstall MySQL and redo everything but it now loads up.

For some reason though its very slow, though DB queries are fast. Only going at a few tens of B/s for some reason. page doesnt display correctly either. The links to setting's modules ect doesnt seem to work either.

Im going to come back to this in a day or two have some other work to do so going to concentrate on that.

Thanks again for all the help.