Web development help- databases and whatnot

[Josquius]

I've got a lot of free time so am trying to get back into web development.
I'm going to pick up on the project I've wanted to do for a while now and....'tis challenging.

What I want to do is have user added data in a database which is then drawn on to alter the colour of icons in an image. e.g. think of something like an election map, the colour of an area changes depending on how many users picked which party in that area.

What should I be looking into in order to create this database?
Mysql I guess is the only option?

Is validation hard to do?- this is just a fun little project, nothing serious, so I don't need validation though for good practice it would be nice to have some sort of email validation system like in forum sign ups.

At the moment I'm leaning towards the idea of using forum software- I don't really need the forum but it would give me the setup I need for datagathering, phpBB looks good, with it being open source I can pull out what I don't need.

Another question- how do I test run a website?
I don't want to go and register a domain and everything before I even know if I can do this or if its worthwhile. Is there anyway to host the website, database, etc... locally so I can test how it would work when online?

[DontSayBanana]

Honestly, this sounds like a lot of legwork for what could be a fairly simple web app.  I noticed you said "get back into web development-" may I ask how much background you've already got?

[Josquius]

Honestly, this sounds like a lot of legwork for what could be a fairly simple web app.  I noticed you said "get back into web development-" may I ask how much background you've already got?

Just uni stuff and messing on alone. No employment or anything- this too would be just faffing on for myself.

This should be simple? Is seeming rather hard for me...and a lot of it isn't about getting things done as simply as possible but learning a bit.

[Iormlund]

What language are you planning to use? PHP, JSP, ASP?

You can use a number of DBs. If SQL is what you are interested in MySQL is popular to start with. There's also Microsoft SQL Server (Express version is free), Oracle or PostgreSQL (open source, free for commerical work).

You can run the site locally by installing a the DB server, a web server (Apache is the most popular) and the virtual machine of the language you are going to use. There are a few packs out there that do this all at once, like EasyPHP (PHP + Apache + MySQL). Then just point to the localhost in your browser.

[DontSayBanana]

Just uni stuff and messing on alone. No employment or anything- this too would be just faffing on for myself.

This should be simple? Is seeming rather hard for me...and a lot of it isn't about getting things done as simply as possible but learning a bit.

Ah.  Well, for development, I use XAMPP- it's an AMP server package (Apache + MySQL + PHP), like Iormlund mentioned.  Once you've got an HTTP server installed on your computer, you can access it on the computer itself by checking localhost in your browser.

As a tutor, who just happens to cover this topic, I've got a couple of beefs with modding prefab software like what you're talking about doing:

1) Forum software is modular.  Tons of scripts, tons of CSS tags, so you're more likely to just jettison things you don't need than learn the things that you do.
2) Forum software is huge and complex.  It's modular for a reason, but even being broken down, it's a lot of components to juggle.  My reasoning is: the bigger the code, the quicker you get frustrated, and the quicker you get frustrated, the quicker you lose drive to work on the project.
3) Performance.  Especially in web apps, you need to streamline as much as possible.  You never know who's still in the land of 56Ks, so you want your pages to be as small and your scripts as efficient as possible.

If it were me doing this project, I'd use HTML forms, JavaScript for variable management, and a single flat file to store the variables, then make it all pretty with CSS.  I would give you one hint, and that that's some of the code you're going to want is actually HTML DOM, not pure JavaScript.  Especially "innerHTML."

[Josquius]

What language are you planning to use? PHP, JSP, ASP?

You can use a number of DBs. If SQL is what you are interested in MySQL is popular to start with. There's also Microsoft SQL Server (Express version is free), Oracle or PostgreSQL (open source, free for commerical work).

You can run the site locally by installing a the DB server, a web server (Apache is the most popular) and the virtual machine of the language you are going to use. There are a few packs out there that do this all at once, like EasyPHP (PHP + Apache + MySQL). Then just point to the localhost in your browser.

Whichever seems the most effective. PHP is the only one of them I really know but learning new stuff is always good. I haven't really thought about the actual making the website part yet as that is the easy part. Figuring out about the image and the databases is the tricky bit.
Servers and web databases and such like are quite new to me- I did touch upon mysql in uni but that was long ago and the teaching sucked.
Learning html5 is certainly a major goal- I always wanted to learn flash....and never manged it, I've seen some html5 demos and this intruiges me.

Ah.  Well, for development, I use XAMPP- it's an AMP server package (Apache + MySQL + PHP), like Iormlund mentioned.  Once you've got an HTTP server installed on your computer, you can access it on the computer itself by checking localhost in your browser.

As a tutor, who just happens to cover this topic, I've got a couple of beefs with modding prefab software like what you're talking about doing:

1) Forum software is modular.  Tons of scripts, tons of CSS tags, so you're more likely to just jettison things you don't need than learn the things that you do.
2) Forum software is huge and complex.  It's modular for a reason, but even being broken down, it's a lot of components to juggle.  My reasoning is: the bigger the code, the quicker you get frustrated, and the quicker you get frustrated, the quicker you lose drive to work on the project.
3) Performance.  Especially in web apps, you need to streamline as much as possible.  You never know who's still in the land of 56Ks, so you want your pages to be as small and your scripts as efficient as possible.

If it were me doing this project, I'd use HTML forms, JavaScript for variable management, and a single flat file to store the variables, then make it all pretty with CSS.  I would give you one hint, and that that's some of the code you're going to want is actually HTML DOM, not pure JavaScript.  Especially "innerHTML."

What about validation?
The whole sign up and validation link sort of thing is something I'd like to look into but I've no clue how to do that sort of thing, it was due to thinking about that that the idea to look at forum software appeared.

HTML DOM....now that I do not know.

[Josquius]

So, I'm plotting and I think getting a database website up and running should be my first priority. The graphics handling stuff can come later.

I think I'm going to go with trying to get something done using vb.net, that is freshest in my mind and I quite liked using it. However....so far everything I did with it was within a development enivironment- how do you go about actually utilising it in websites?

[citizen k]

HTML DOM....now that I do not know.

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/default.asp