[NDBounce]

I am getting ready to take on a major experiment at work. First off, let me state this: I work for a small, non-profit agency that has no budget. I am the closest thing to a tech guy that we have, which is scary.

I use my personal iBook (rev A, 300Mhz G3 and a 12.1GB HD) at work as well as a Dell machine which is on our network of about 12 computers).

We have a Database that is awful, and done wrong. But since we have no $$$ we are going to build on a poor foundation (don't blame me, but that's what the boss wants to do). Our DB contains a bunch of information for over 230 Member programs. What I want to do is put this on the web and give the member programs the ability to log on to our website and update thier information online. (BTW the Database is an MS Access Database).

I was told that I can do this using ASP fairly painlessly. I don't know ASP, but one of my friends told me I should be able to pick up ASP in a Nutshell and I'll be fine. However, my friend is a PC guy, and he didn't know if asp development could be done on a mac. He was mentioning that I would need a web server to run the code to test it out, yadda yadda.

Can I do the development on a mac? If so, what schtuff will I need?

Also, if anyone has any better (and cost conscious - remember we're working with a budget of close to zero here) ideas on how to handle this project let me know.

Peace,

O
B unce!

[wallinbl]

ASP is basically a scripting platform. It generally is run in IIS (on a Windows NT/2000) server. It is included as part of the operating system, so if you have a Windows 2000 (or NT 4) server, you have IIS & ASP. There are programs available to run IIS on other platforms (ChiliSoft sells one). It is generally expensive, though.

ASP is very easy to learn. I used the Wrox Press books to learn it. I found that it wasn't long before I dropped the books for good because there isn't much to the language. I find the Nutshell books to be lacking in certain key pieces of information (all depends on the information you are looking for, I guess).

PHP is an alternative to consider. It runs on OS X, Linux, Windows, etc. It is free (and open source). It is also very easy to learn. I also picked up a Wrox Press book for learning this. I don't refer back to the book much, but I do refer to the http://www.php.net/ website frequently (there is a ton of documentation on there).

Both ASP & PHP are scripting languages that are used to generate text output (most often in HTML). You write them in any text editor (BBEdit will do fine), put them in a directory that the webserver (IIS, Apache, etc) uses, and request them in a browser.

If you already know some programming (variables, loops, etc), then either will be easy to learn. All you really have to learn is the database access code. It will also help you to know HTML.

If you decide to outsource, I'd be happy to help you!

[MadBrowser]

MS bashing aside, using ASP and MS Access WILL NOT scale very well. While it is true that MS Access can be used as an ASP data source via ODBC, it was not designed as a multi-user relational database. It will die under any kind of real load.

Since you are starting out, I would STRONGLY recommend going with a different solution...

There is a lot of excellent free software out there that will work great.

I would recommend PHP instead of ASP and MySQL of PostgreSQL instead of MS Access. They will perform better and are just as easy to use. Also, these skills are fairly common and I'm sure you could probably find someone willing to donate some time to your cause.

Also, I am not sure what kind of license you need to use MS Access and ASP on the Web. MS might want more money to get that in there.