[ale] So many choices....

[Chris Ricker]

Thanks for all the input, people.

After looking them over, I decided to go with MySQL over PostgreSQL.  The
main difference between the two seemed to be that Postgres offers some of
the high-end features (triggers, transactions w/ rollback) that could be
quite useful in the Real World.  Also, MySQL is reportedly faster.  Since I
couldn't conceive of any reason I might ever want to use transactions for
this, and since speed never hurts, mysql seemed the best choice.

I was quite impressed with PHP.  I'd always heard it was easy to do db stuff
with, but I didn't realize just how easy (of course, I'm comparing it to
some stuff I was doing a couple of years ago using Perl, which may or may
not be a fair comparison with all the perl modules which have been written
since then).  It only took me a couple of hours to get my db set up and nice
little data entry, data viewing, and administrative web pages whipped up for
my tables....

For those who were wondering what PHP is, check out <http://www.php.net/>.
Basically, it's a server-side HTML-embedded scripting language (like
Microsoft's ASP, but cross-platform and open-source).  You either run it as
a module embedded in your web server (apache or fhttpd) or as a cgi (any
thing else), and your web server / the cgi looks for blocks like

<?php

/* put your code here */

?>

in your pages as it's serving them, and processes that code into HTML before
it sends them to the client.  Syntax-wise, it's perl / C-ish.  There's a
fairly complete manual online, and tons of howto-type stuff and example code
from all the other web monkeys who are using it....

As for the mysql/php group, thanks for the info, but I live in Salt Lake
City now so that's probably not an option ;-).  Is there a mailing list for
that group?

later,
chris

-- 
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                              chris.ricker at genetics.utah.edu