Be Excellent To Each Other

ARGH!

All I want to do is have a database of the reviews on PEOWW, so I can have a list that be ordered by name, score, format. that kind of thing.

so far my options seem to be ASP which I tried a bit of at uni and it made me cry or PHP. which seems to have documentation written exclusively by cunts.

please tell me there's an easy way.

anyone?!

PHP and mySQL is the easy way, honest.

Heeeyyy!

I have no idea what ou are talking about, but it's so lovely to see you.

Post more often, Bluce, 'cos I is missin' you over 'ere.

Yes. I is.

Even I'm getting the hang of it and I'm thick.

ok, ta people.

i'm generally alright when I get started but all the 'getting started' tutorials seem to assume that you know how to set up SQL and PHP already.

the site is hosted on 1&1 which, I think, supports PHP but finding out what I need to install (and how to configure it) is proving to be chore!

If it wasn't easy I'd still be mashing my own head against a wall and going 'davabades? wat dat? buuuuuh'.

something like mysqlfront or heidisql will make it magnificently easy for you to create the necessary tables and fields in mySQL, and the interface is so tidy that you won't have to build yourself an interface to insert stuff into the table, you can just do it directly.

Then all you need is the most basic of php code to pull it all out and arrange it nicely.

Unless you own a dedicated server with them, you won't have the power to install anything I don't think. It'll either be installed already, or not, and if you want anything else you'd either have to ask them very nicely or upgrade your account.

ah right, hopefully they'll make it easy for then and already support it.

is this supposed to happen?

http://www.peoww.co.uk/hello.psp

Pretty much all linux hosting comes with mysql/php and phpmyadmin as standard which makes things easier. There's even a flash version of phpmyadmin which is worth the $5 it costs.

You've got the wrong extension on that. It should work fine as a .htm I believe.

The Tizag tutorials are pretty good.

No, it would need to be .php to run as a PHP script unless the host has a weird setup.

Using PHP and mySQL is dead easy, but if you're totally new to "proper" programming it might be a bit much to take on board. If you want someone to do it all for you, I'm very reasonable

1 database = one living room decorated?

thanks for the offer but I'm determined to learn. I've done a fair bit of Java and C stuff, although will have forgotten everything now.

cheers for all the advices so far. I'll start plugging away!

See.. told you I was thick

erk!

1&1 basic package doesn't support SQL or something. meep!

thwart-me-do!

Thats a ball-ache, they must have some database capability, or they're the suck. The alternative is flat files, which you don't even want to think about I'd say

it may be possible but they hide the information exceptionally well.

i'm on the fiver a month package which would appear to offer no database support at all. although I dont know what would happen if I hosted a database and tried to access it. but in terms of getting the connection info for that SQL Front program I think I'd be scuppered.

the nine quid a month package gives you all the database gubbins including a database making app thing which apparently does it all for you but I kind of wanted to learn something. and I know it's not much money but it's the principle.

hmph!

A fiver a month for hosting without a database server is daylight robbery. Someone recommend this man better hosting.

Not the cheapest out there but I'm with ukhost4u who are pretty good.

Looking at 1&1's site, moving to a new host might involve a certain amount of ballache; I think Mr Ree would have to pay to transfer the domain away from them (and I couldn't see any mention of how much it'll cost which strikes me as somewhat suspicious), assuming peoww.co.uk was the free domain he chose when he took the package.

i've done some googling and found out how to transfer away.

http://www.thepoorhouse.org.uk/transfer ... and1_co_uk


the annoyance is that when you search for new web hosts there are always a ton of horror stories telling you that host is awful!

I host websites dude: http://www.2dfx.co.uk/host60.php

I currently have about 30 or so paying customers who are nothing but happy

ASP.net may well be handy, if you affrord the hosting. Very much like programming in windows, and in your language of choice*

* - So long as your language of choice is either VB or C#.

I personally found PHP to be quite horrendous, but I am very much a c++ programmer. Never tried ASP, but it doesn't look as good for rapid development as ASP.net. They're quite different.

Cor - that's a surprising thing to hear - php is pretty much agreed by everyone to have the best documentation around.
Which bit did you take a look at?

Yeah, the php manual is pretty awesome. Where it's not very well documented by the developers there's usually a user-contributed explanation.

Conversely when I poked at asp I found it almost impossible to find any useful info.

that may have been written in anger, due to the massive amount of FAIL that my efforts had generated!

i did a bit of ASP back at uni as well (with absolutely no help from any of the staff). i got it working but it was pretty messy and i still don't even know if 1&1 will let me work with it!

If you're looking for a new host, I'll recommend Flump.net - nothing but professional, quality service and support and excellent uptime. Also, if you ask nicely they may even handle your transfer from your current hosts for you, they're nice like that.

ASP is easy to pick up, especially if you have done any VBA or VBScript stuff.

Actually, I've been meaning the rant about the state of documentation on my blog. Basically, most documentation but especially PHP and the various *nix stuff is pathetic. I don't mean wrong, because in fact, it is hyper detailed and of no use whatsoever to someone trying to pick it all up and understand it. There is absolutely no middle ground for people who Just Want To Get Stuff Done.

Documentation tends to go something like

"Welcome to Super Pro Language X. Lesson 1, adding two numbers together. This is done by using the plus sign to "add" the numbers. Try it and see.

Lesson 2, multiplying two numbers. This is done by using the * sign to "multiply" the numbers. Try it and see.

Lesson 3, building a quantum based interstellar portal. This is achieved by factoring the three eights gripley module, hacking in flibertygibbet.fd (of course, removing the hurdygurdy.gf code) and then flarkerkarking the whoojamayflip. Can't get it to work? Fuck off then you fucking n00b.

I used nothing but the manual when I was learning - I was in an offline environment (and I certainly couldn't afford books) so a windows help file of the php manual was all I had. I thought it was really quite good.

If they dont have db support, you might be able to hack something together with SQLlite. I`m sure php can handle it. You dont need a db server as such, it sort of uses a flat file and does magic with it.

You can practice your code on a windows PC by installing Apache, PHP and MySQL onto it.
I recommed XAMPP, which does it all for you: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
Or maybe EasyPHP: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... p_id=14045

I was being a little unfair to PHP, as the help file is better than most.

However, it does suffer the usual open source/*nix problem of trying to be all things to all people and jumping on whatever bandwagon is currently rolling by.

For example, there are two ways of dealing with databases. Objected or not ($result->free or mysqli_free_result($result); You've got this duplication for everything, depending on where you go one way or the other.

I never, ever, figured out which was the right way to go. And the bit that really got me was that you could do both at the same time. And then retrieving data got a bit complicated - retrieve a row by mysqli_fetch_assoc? mysqli_fetch_row? mysqli_fetch_object? $result->fetch_assoc? $result->fetch_row? $result->fetch_object?

All undoubtedly powerful useful and utterly bloody bewildering for a bloke just going "I want to get the value of that field, please. You know, like I can do in VBA".

I really ought to write that blog entry.

It's just really flexible, you can get results as an array, associative array, or object result set. For different situations this is an extremely handy feature.

The problem with PHP isn't the documentation, it's the inconsistent order of parameters in functions.

Is it strstr($haystack, $needle) or strstr($needle, $haystack)? It's the former, when many other functions are the latter.

This isn't a result of bandwidth-jumping though. In fact, as Open Source projects are almost exclusively worked on by volunteers (exception example: Eclipse), who therefore tend to be quite committed and passionate and very good about not jumping on $HOT_NEW_THING just for the sake of it.

PHP has more than one way of doing lots of things because it's quite old and has changed a lot over the years. It has therefore acquired some cruft. If you want really slick webapps in an open source language and framework, go look at Ruby on Rails, which is light and elegant.

As for PHP's alleged inconsistencies: it is absolutely as nothing in this regard compared to the towering collection of rubbish that is COM. All Windows client programming before .Net is just awful, entirely because of this cascading collection of APIs dating back to the win16 codebase.

I have to agree with you there, Mr. Gaywood. The introduction of .NET revolutionised Windows programming something fierce.

Thirded.

Getting my head around ASP.NET, having coded ASP for a few years was a right royal bastard though.

I'm dealing with Sharepoint 2007 at the moment, and when that works it is brilliant. However, a couple of decades of not dealing with users properly (a la Unix) means that when it comes to permissions some pretty big pigeons are coming home to roost.

I would have thought it would be the other way around. Everyone has their own way of doing things and own 'pet methods', and when you're dealing with a varied set of developers from around the world, surely one of the disadvantages is that you tend to end up with inconsistancies in approach?

Even quite humungous open source projects, Apache HTTPd, Linux, etc -- actually have a small number of committers, typically no more than a few dozen. They also tend to have very strong authority figures at the top of the tree. So this isn't the problem you'd think.

Namedrop! I asked Rasmus Lerdorf if he was going to fix that in PHP6. He said "no".

Can't see how he could possibly fix it at this stage. Imagine what would happen to all the legacy code if the server got updated - nightmare.

One script to swap the params would fix it though.

Yup. Or a ini setting that holds it in 'legacy' mode.

This is a better idea, but it doesn't fix muscle memory in hundreds of thousands of coders around the world, and it makes shipping code hard (what if I want to run two PHP apps on my server, one new, one old?). As untidy as it is (and I'm a fan of cleaning up cruft as a language, API, or framework evolves), this is the kind of thing I would leave alone if I were King of the World.

Don't fancy the thought of that.

A lot of people got confused when register_globals went from on to off by default. I don't mind saying a few bits of my code borked and were subjected to frantic corrections.

thanks again for all this info.

it turns out my 1&1 package is 1.99 a month. although the 4.99 package still doesnt have SQL support.

I like PHP. The problem with the docs is that you have to have a decent understanding of it all before you can filter the user supplied comments into good, bad and dangerous.


You know about the PHP5 drive?

Eshk! You haven't upgraded?
[edit]MySQL 4 too, I see. How come?

PHP5 is on the system if you need to use it, but I've been wary to enforce it for those who I can't to make sure their code is up to date. I'll get there eventually

mySQL I believe is handled by cpanel in terms of updates. Chances are they haven't released it with their latest builds yet, or they have and I just haven't ticked the appropriate 'upgrade' box. Again, wary of any problems that might occur, and it's not like people are crying out for new, currently unsupported features.