school website database project
 

Hello. I'm not for sure if this is the correct place to post this but I'm guessing that I'll be using either C# or Java to do this project of mine.

I'm taking a high school class rightnow that teaches about business ethics. I'm in the web page division where I help manage the school's site. Since I'm not the manager of the team I was chosen to do bland work because apparently I lack creativity, for example I do not believe that the site should be covered in flash but whatever. Well I haven't done much in the past few weeks and today I am presented with a new assignment, let me explain. Students are getting together a student store and the web dev team has to code a page for it, the page has almost been completed actually. My teacher wants people to be able to click an image link that says "Order yearbooks here" for them to order yearbooks with. Today he tells me to "code a database" and then goes back to his desk. I'm pretty confused and I have until Friday to have something decent up and running.

I have heard from several that Java or C# would be the language to use for integrating web sites and compiled lanuages together. My first question would be: is my teacher describing a database? I'm not exactly for sure of what he wants specifically, so I'm out of luck there. Secondly, should I use .NET stuff like C# and would the user have to have .NET 2.0 to display the app? I was cruising visual studio 2K5 and I noticed that there was an option to create a database but first you must set up your own server, which I attempted to do but failed upon opening the connection and it wouldn't let me write or drag/drop a gui. Thirdly, is this an incredibly daunting task or a simple one? I've heard people say that programmers working for a company get paid incredibly if they code a database, so it's probably hard.

Overall I'm confused on what to do specifically. It sounds like he wants an application that will run in a browser like IE/Firefox and ask questions like how many yearbooks do you want, etc. and then will synch to a database server set up like mysql or something that will keep an overall record of what people want. I'm just lost on where to start. I need the most efficient and quick way to do this, I don't care about portability at this point with .NET 2.0 - I just need to get this in to get a good grade, changes can be made later. Thanks.

You can have a 3-tier situation where the browser is the client, something good for web design (PHP, Perl, even Python) is on the server, and the DB responds to the server. Personally, I'd use PHP or Python and mySQL. Lemme tell ya, if you need something by yesterday, you're up shit creek, if you have to ask.

Thanks for the info. I'm guessing my teacher is somewhat inept, considering I was told to do this today and have something completed by friday. I'm not insulting him but I believe that he is severely lacking good information. I'll tell him that this might take a few weeks, especially since I lack experience in php and other server side lanuages.

So essentially then.. mysql must be installed on a server at the school, then I use python to design a GUI? I didn't know that you could create gui's with it, and we just use php on our servers to display information on the page through .txt files I believe, I don't know much about it actually. Well my list of events may sound stupid and incorrect but I'm still trying to piece together the fragments so I can present the information to my teacher tomorrow. Thanks again.

edit: I didn't know php was powerful enough to design GUI's but I guess I was wrong. I found this while doing a bit of reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php#Cli...I_applications

Does this application need to be a web app or a application that runs on the desktop?

Either way I think you have some questions to ask your instructor to find out exactly what is wanted of you.

A web application, making me more and more hesitant to use any .NET stuff actually.

I guess the other thing to find out is if the server already has php and mysql installed. If so I would do it all in php. It shouldn't be to hard but you are going to have to try and get more info from your instructor so you can know exactly what information the database will need to store and what the web app will do exactly and how they want it to do it.

Cool, thanks. I do believe we have mysql already on our servers, as I've seen the open port to it. I'm downloading PHP-GTK as I type and I will quickly start learning the basics so I can code this app.

If its a web app you shouldn't need php-gtk, php. PHP and html is all you should need to do the gui, so then the output will be viewed in the browser. Like the software that runs this site was written in php.

oh. Alright, that makes things easier. That's also good to know because the gtk mirror keeps timing out. I'll read up more on creating native php gui apps, thanks again.

Go look at my TicTacToe, that's a browser gui.