Heya all, just a little confused here. Recently I created a web site which is almost complete. Now I am at the stage of where I need to decide how people visiting my web can search a database to find products or services they are looking for. Similar to a white pages web site. I have done a little reaserch and find that there are several ways in putting this together,. Recently I discovered that there are programs like JSP ASP Coldfusion PHP etc. I dont know which way to go or what would be better for the service I am looking for. Can anyone suggest what to do from here or which of the above I should be looking at...
I did purchase a book called Dreamweaver MX 2004 with asp, coldfusion and php, but I find it a little waste to go into all of these applications when I realy only nead to use one of them... I have copied a file which my ISPs supports but still dosent click with me. Thanks heaps.
MalHYP.

"Adding a Search Engine to your website
A free Search Engine is pre-installed in most of our Web-hosting packages. It is not available for JSP and ASP hosting clients.
Our Zeus servers come with a built in search engine, that you can use on your Website.

Zeus indexes your Website every night, enabling you to have a search engine on your Website.
Simply add the following form action to your Website, exactly as it is written below:
<form action="/search" method=POST>
<input type=hidden name=indexfile value="$$indexfile;">
<input type=hidden name=template value="$$template;">
Query: <input type=text name=expr value="">
<input type=submit value=Search>
</form>
Note: If you would like to exclude certain directories (folders) from being indexed, you can do so.
Open Notepad and save a file in each directory to be excluded called ".NoZeusIndex.txt".
Upload this file to your webserver
Rename each file, on the server, removing the ".txt". You will end up with a file in each directory called ".NoZeusIndex"
It is not possible to create files with no extension on your hard drive, because Windows/MAC will insist on you including a file type".

It doesn't look to me like their search is going to help you all that much. I would imagine the service that they provide is a simple search of the text-only files in your website's directory tree, which won't help any in searching a database. Here are a few tips to get you on your way:

- Figure out what server-side technologies are offered by your hosting service. You can only use PHP if they have the PHP script interpreter available on their servers. Same for ASP, Coldfusion, JSP, Perl, etc.
- Find out what sort of database capabilities your service includes. MySQL? MSSQL? Is it running on a Windows, Linux, Unix, etc. box?
- Figure out what your most likely demographic is. Are they more likely to have new computers? Older computers? Macs, PCs?

Collect all this information, and then try to find a site online that compares and contrasts the technologies you listed above, and use that to make an informed decision on which would be best for you.

That having been said, my favorite server-side scripting language is PHP. On a properly setup server box, it's very fast, forgiving, and robust. Plus, it's strictly for server-side scripting (as opposed to, say, embedding COM objects in an ASP page, which are run on the client side), so using it doesn't, prima facia, change the range of customers you can support. Also, PHP has very easy database querying functionality for a wide range of databases (I've used MySQL, Oracle, and Access via ODBC, and they're all quite straightforward; PHP supports a host of other databases besides these, as well). And, most importantly for you at this juncture, the learning curve on PHP is very shallow if you have any programming experience. I had written my first database-driven frontend in PHP within a day of starting the language.

Good luck!

~Dathan