Creating a database driven website

[Zach]

Hello,

I'm trying to create a website for my lighting store where customers
can add products to a cart and pay online. I have created one in HTML
using a Paypal shopping cart...but it is taking way too long and will
be too hard to update. There is a potential to list thousands of
different lights, so I need to be able to update the website easily and
efficiently. I'm comfortable with programs like Macromedia Dreamweaver,
Microsoft Access, etc. and programming languages such as HTML and C++.
What language(s) or program(s) should I use to create this website?
Could you recommend any good tutorials? How hard do you think it will
be to pick up the required languages considering my current knowledge?


Thanks for the help,
Zach

 

[Rik]

Hello,

I'm trying to create a website for my lighting store where customers
can add products to a cart and pay online. I have created one in HTML
using a Paypal shopping cart...but it is taking way too long and will
be too hard to update. There is a potential to list thousands of
different lights, so I need to be able to update the website easily
and efficiently. I'm comfortable with programs like Macromedia
Dreamweaver, Microsoft Access, etc. and programming languages such as
HTML and C++. What language(s) or program(s) should I use to create
this website? Could you recommend any good tutorials? How hard do you
think it will be to pick up the required languages considering my
current knowledge?

Allthough this comment is tainted by my preference:
- Server side language: PHP (is easy to learn if you know C++)
- Database: mysql or postgresql (oracle rocks, but hardly appropriate in
this case..).

Allthough, referring to HTML as a "programming language"... It's Hyper Text
_Markup_ Language. It has nothing to do with programming whatsoever.

PHP and MySQL are part of many, if not most (serious), hosting packages.

Grtz,

 

[David Segall]

Hello,

I'm trying to create a website for my lighting store where customers
can add products to a cart and pay online. I have created one in HTML
using a Paypal shopping cart...but it is taking way too long and will
be too hard to update. There is a potential to list thousands of
different lights, so I need to be able to update the website easily and
efficiently. I'm comfortable with programs like Macromedia Dreamweaver,
Microsoft Access, etc. and programming languages such as HTML and C++.
What language(s) or program(s) should I use to create this website?
Could you recommend any good tutorials? How hard do you think it will
be to pick up the required languages considering my current knowledge?

I suggest you use an existing shopping cart program. A search of the
Open Source projects at <http://sourceforge.net> for shopping cart
yielded 221 hits.

If you really want to write the application yourself then Microsoft's
Visual Web Developer Express Edition
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/> or Sun's Java Studio
Creator
<http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jscreator/index.jsp>
will make the job much easier. Both are currently free but will commit
you to choosing an ASP or JSP server respectively.