I need to know which tools you recommend that I purchase in order to create a website that is hooked directly to an SQL Server database, dynamically. Meaning that visitors can enter infomation, ie "Show me all doctors listed in the NY area". I then can program it to query the database, then dynamically create a "response" page with the "hits", and present it to the user. I've used NetObjects 2.0, which seems to have some light interfaces like this, but pretty much, they're pretty much, just exports, available at website design time. Is there any one tool that can cover most of this, or is this all so new, that it's still evolving? Please help! Thanks a lot.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 1998

Answers

Re: Need Website Design Tool with SQL Server DB Interface

Patrick,

You can meet your needs with Internet Information Server (IIS) and Visual Source Safe (or other source code control tool). You use the source code control tool to recover your site when you make mistakes.

IIS allows you to write active server pages. Active Server Pages allow you to use server side scripting (using VBScript mostly). You may put client side scripting on your web pages as well (this is mostly to check the validity of inputs). This combined with a few choice SQL stored procedures is very powerful and browser independent.

The technologies I would avoid are ActiveX components and Visual Studio or FrontPage. To me ActiveX components seem unnecessary and a way for Microsoft to require people to use IE rather than a Netscape browser. Visual Studio and FrontPage, what ever their other merits, simply do not work with IIS when IIS is running a 128 bit secure site. (Microsoft ate a $200 support call when I informed them of that bug.)

You can find support for ASP at www.15seconds.com and www.asphole.com. I was also very lucky to have a colleague that had done this before.

Hope this helps,

Eric

-- Anonymous, July 03, 1998