Need a Vast Amount of Help

[ObiwanJebroni]

Hi. I was browsing around on the internet at work and I found these forums. Hopefully, I can have some free help from you people because you all seem pretty knowledgeable

Ok, firstly, my boss has asked me to design a website for our division. Aside from the graphics and the Javascript, applets, and html, I need to add some other essential things that my boss expects.

Firstly, the website I'm designing has two options that I do not yet know how to go about doing yet. I'll detail them below:

(1)
The first thing I need to do is to set up a page where the user can make queries to our SQL Server on the webpage without having to download any intermediate software. At first, I thought that this was possible is Javascript, but after scanning several tutorials, I realized that this may not be the case. First of all, the database contains some secret information which I wouldn't wish to be made public domain. I took a look at the CGI needed to do it, but the tutorial required a UNIX server, which I unfortunately do not have. Finally, I settled on PHP, because I know of an example from my school (http://ben.mbhs.edu/home) that seemed to be able to handle such things. Any suggestions on how I could go about doing this?

(2)
The other problem I have is quite similar to the first. My boss has asked that before anyone downloads any of the database software we have, they must enter certain information. He wants this information encrypted by an algorithm, then sent to his e-mail. Though this seems pretty basic, I can't seem to think of a way. Any suggestions for this one?

Thanks for listening. Keep in mind that I'm only 16, so nothing too complicated please

[firepages]

Hi, first question is .... how/where are you planning to host your webpages & you mention your SQL server.. is that MS SQL Server or another flavour? , basically how your hosting is setup will decide in part how to go forward.

PHP can connect to any DB worth mentioning (and a few not worth mentioning ) + the native connection functions make it a shallow learning curve to get connected and return data.

As for sensitive data you only need display that which you want to, so that is not really an issue (assuming your DB is hosted securely)

writing encryption routines via PHP is as easy or as hard as you wish to make it.

Tto find more about PHP think up a word that might be a function and tag it on the end of the PHP uri , i.e. www.php.net/encryption
and you will get a list of useful links.


err, so yes basically we need to know what platform and software you intend to run your site with to be of any help.

[ObiwanJebroni]

Platform and Software

Sorry about that. The DB is run on an MS SQL server. I'm not sure if this has to be on the same server as the web server for it to work, but I can check that on my own. The web server is Unix, I believe.

[whackaxe]

if MS SQL is like my SQL then you dont need to have both on the same host the syntax on connectuong to a msserver from php is this

mssql_connect("loaclhost", "username", "password") 

localhost is a reference to the machine that the scrupt is run on. you would just have to change this to your servers machine IP

[Spookster]

Is this site going to be an Intranet site meaning it is only accessible to those on your companies network or is this going to be an Internet site accessible to the public?

As for keeping the information exclusive to certain people then you will probably want to set it up so that people need to log in to that section of the website. That is done quite easily with PHP.

[ObiwanJebroni]

The site will be accessible to the general public. The division I work at is relatively small so the people in it simply want to have access to the database from home or from a remote place. Since they don't like downloading the VB program to accomplish this (since there are many problems with activeX components and such), they want me to put this online so that can query directly. I'm still at the beginning stages of learning PHP so I'm going to sound like a total amateur (which I am) for a while. Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

[Spookster]

Well just as already has been mentioned just create a login section of the site and create logins for those that need access and from there you can query the database using php quite easily. Just figure out what kind of queries they might need and set up a page that they can search the db however they need and display the data.