Alright... this is what I'm looking at doing: Developing a website that is fully automated (or as close to fully as possible) in it's updates. I want to make objects that contain strings of text, and strings of numbers, then make computations, link locations in my site to, and pull data from, these objects. These objects must be able to take in data from text files that are changing regularly, and display the changes on the website.

I am quite persistant, and I believe I can learn anything given sufficient motivation. But the question at hand is: What development tool should I use?

I have Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003 installed (Visual Basic, C++, and all sorts of other crap) . I also have MS Excel (which I am quite fluent in, but seems to be limited in handling and refrencing objects), and I've tinkered with making .html files with it. Keep in mind I have NEVER made a web page before, and I will most likely get help with the artistic side of it. I THINK what I'm trying to do is pretty basic: It's all text and numbers... no fancy stuff. I have ACTool, and X-U-n-l-e-a-s-h-e-d (...if I can say that word here) as well.

The reason I ask this forum is because .... we'll you're all into this kinda stuff and I've gotten GREAT answers from you folks in the past. I would just pick a program and jump into it, but I'm looking at hundreds of hours of my time being spent... and I'd HATE to pick a development tool that is incapable of or inefficient at what I am trying to do. So when in doubt, ask the experts! Thanks for your time.

sounds like you want to look into ASP.NET and/or PHP/MySQL, for starters

-ken

I've chosen PHP/MySQL and I am completely satisfied/amazed with the power and ease of use.

for low end, I would use simple apache with SSI, using perl and mysql


for high end, I would deffinately use Apache::ASP, or PHP, and MySQL..


I used to have a setup similar to this; had a cron job on my server that read a bunch of text files (emails), and added em to the mysql database hourly.. mainly because I had no need for instant action when the text files were created..

good luck though

Command