quote:
Possibly. Incidentally, you can use CGI (Common Gateway Interface) on IIS. I use PHP's CGI facilities in all my database-driven web applications.
Probably the ASP script you looked at was actually a VBS script that used ASP. Or maybe you say "within ASP." I dunno because I've never used ASP, but my understanding is that it's sort of analogous to CGI but provides more database-related features.
Anyhow, depending on what you're doing, it may be just as easy (and way more portable) to do the whole project in PHP and use CGI for input and PHP's native ODBC functions for DB access. Have you used other procedural languages?
BTW, regex = regular expression (pattern matching/substitution stuff)
For insight into the "complex data structures" stuff (in Perl, though the concepts apply in PHP, where they're easier to execute) see here.
What the heck is this project, anyhow?
(We should probably be having this discussion in the "I am a Colossal Geek" thread.)
I designed and maintain an intranet web site for use by our call agents. We get a lot of different types of calls from various customers and for various products, so the intranet web site provides reference materials to aid the call receipt and technician dispatch process. The site consists of dozens of web pages accessed through a Javascripted front-end form.
The project for which I originally started looking into ASP involved creating a form that would feed the data into a pre-formatted email message. I found out that this particular email process was probably going to be temporary, so I am holding off on that project for now.
I was intrigued by ASP, though, and used it yesterday to create a form for another process. This one required filling out a form, printing it out, and faxing it to a particular customer. (We do have a fax server, but I haven't the slightest clue how to access it.) We were using a Word document, but it takes too long to load and the boneheads here could alter the form. I used ASP to create a form that sends the data into a pre-formatted page that the user can print out.
I would try to do more, but I am somewhat handicapped by my status here. All of this web development work that I do is not part of my job description, and I am not part of our IS staff (they are outsourced). Therefore, I can only do things that don't require formal development or expenditure of company resources. I'd love to learn how to tie in a database to our web site, but I don't have the resources (time, IS cooperation, etc.) for that at this point.
I think I may try to tackle an ASP-based search tool next. I have a Javascript-based search page, but it requires manual entry of keywords. I've been dying to improve on that for a while. I was thinking of using ASP's textfile-reading and FileSystem capabilities to do this, but I would have to figure out how to weed out html tags and files that I don't want read. Any suggestions?
As far as procedural languages go, I just recently started learning C++ (more the procedural aspects of it than object-oriented methods so far).
Doesn't PHP have to be enabled on the server to work?
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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."