ASP login useful program

[Availor]

I found THIS software. Seems cheap and extremely useful for web developers.

[stlewis]

Availor

It does look good - at long last something to match Access and good old Lotus Approach in terms of drag-and-drop building. The only problem is that I would want the reporting bit so that means the the full version at $500.

I bought a lot of the ImpaKt bits during the summer which - if you use Dreamweaver - works quite well. But now they have been bought by Adobe so a bit of uncertainty and their Calendar component is no longer supported officially. Grrr. These have the advantage over CCS in that they are bits you add to existing pages - so you control the styles, whereas tools like CCS may take you 90% of the way but then make the last bit very difficult to manage. (I've been involved in the mainframe tools business since about 1980 and this has been the problem all this time!)

[Availor]

500$? So why does it say "starting from 136$" ? Grrr....

I know MS Access, so I guess anything similar would not be too complex to master. I want to create database driven accounts where I can enable users view certein areas within my website.

[stlewis]

Availor

I've found quite a few reviews by googling... several make the point of time saving - you get this if your time is $500 a day or equivalent

Don't you have Dreamweaver? A lot of basic functionality is present there - login/logout, page authorisation, list forms etc.

Impakt adds a souped up list and add/edit/delete form - with help with combo boxes etc. Before I had it, every table needed a list, add, edit, delete & delete confirmation page; now it is down to two. And the edit form has tricks like 'save as new record'.

[Availor]

Don't you have Dreamweaver? A lot of basic functionality is present there - login/logout, page authorisation, list forms etc.

I don't know how to deploy those funciton to the server.... How do I actualy createa a database. I can only create a form so a visitor can send me a comment by e-mail.

Posting a comment in my site, polls and comments... don't know how to make those

[stlewis]

Ahah! Yes, all the functions use a database. CCS needs one too.

You need to have access to MySQL ideally - its the cheapest alternative (SQL Server costs a lot with most hosting packages). Access *can* be used but it is not for multi-user update access.

You can put MySQL on a Windows machine, but then the client's hosting needs it too. If you have Access experience, you will know the basics - what the tables should look like, keys etc, but a book on MySQL is a good idea.

At its most basic, the user table will have a username and password, but a security level is usual too. And add a good key like UserId ie numeric, auto-increment too. You can guarantee you will need it next week.

[juergen]

It might be a good idea to read about aspmembership provider on www.asp.net.
Lots of useful info there and dedicated forums regarding this topic.

and btw:

<< And add a good key like UserId ie numeric, auto-increment too. >>

I personally would say that auto-increment is rather bad to identify a record. Just in case you have a development site at home or work and a production site on a dedicated system. If you add users on both systems, you will never be able to syncronize the data as different users will get same keys.
If you use a unique key like GUID, different users will remain different.

Juergen

[Availor]

I have the ability to export to SQL from access, but I thought I need to know asp, asp.net or php for that matter.

[Availor]

juergen, thanks for the link. Visually it looks sort of like Access, which is more natural to me.

I'd like to know one thing: Is asp.net only supported by windows, or can I deploy it on a linux server as well? And what's the difference between asp and php? I was told asp is rather old and not used anymore, and the most popular database driven language is php. I saw some java, actionscript with xml data bindings that got me curious.

[remi]

I would recommend PHP, because PHP is a open source and a platform independent language (PHP runs under Windows/Linux/UNIX/MacOS X/...) especially for developing Web applications.

PHP is the most important scripting language for the Web with millions of developers (and hundreds of PHP forums with solutions and support on the Net).

The following well known projects use PHP as main language:

• Wikipedia (Wiki)
• vBulletin (this forum)
• phpBB (another popular forum software)
• Wordpress (Blog)
• Textpattern (Blog)
• Serendipity (Blog)
• Typo 3 (CMS)
• Mambo (CMS)
• Joomla (CMS)
• Contenido (CMS)
• Postnuke (CMS)
• PHP-Nuke (CMS)
• phpMyAdmin (MySQL Admin Tool)
• flickr.com (photo sharing)
• friendster.com (social network)
• ...

And you already know, the most important PHP company is from Israel...

For your first steps with PHP:

• Wikipedia article about PHP
• PHP Manual
• Programming PHP
• A collection of PHP books available for free download
• PEAR code library

Regards,
Remi