A new project..

I am planin to start a new project using ASP(3.0).. It is a web search for small homepages... Where all the home pages are indexed and produces result based on the search string by a visitor... I am planin to have a control pannel and all that stuff...

Now i am in a fix.. I am not sure wheathe i should use access or just a plain text file to hold everything.. If i use access many users wont be able to use my script if their service provider does not provide database support but if i use a normal test file.. all manipulation, search will be a tuff job.. what do you recomend...

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Originally posted by vasanth
I am planin to start a new project using ASP(3.0).. It is a web search for small homepages... Where all the home pages are indexed and produces result based on the search string by a visitor... I am planin to have a control pannel and all that stuff...

Now i am in a fix.. I am not sure wheathe i should use access or just a plain text file to hold everything.. If i use access many users wont be able to use my script if their service provider does not provide database support but if i use a normal test file.. all manipulation, search will be a tuff job.. what do you recomend...

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PHP/Perl & MySQL. There aren't many web hosts that have ASP&Access support (except maybe Brinkster). PHP, Perl and MySQL are more common and better.

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Originally posted by Brian
PHP/Perl & MySQL. There aren't many web hosts that have ASP&Access support (except maybe Brinkster). PHP, Perl and MySQL are more common and better.

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I too did a small search and found out that not many host support ASP.. so panin to learn PHP now.. do you think this kind od project will have many users...

for making a searchengine for an abstract webpage, u don;t really need a database.... ASP can do the job alone if u are willing to code it. I came across a script once that searched all the pages' contents (in folders) in a website excluding the ones u specified. i modified it quite a bit to fit my needs. i'll c if i can find the website where i got it from. it'll give u some idea of how to get the script working without a DB.

Brinkster is a free host that supports asp...They make the link for the free service real small though so you have to look closely :)

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Originally posted by Commander
for making a searchengine for an abstract webpage, u don;t really need a database.... ASP can do the job alone if u are willing to code it. I came across a script once that searched all the pages' contents (in folders) in a website excluding the ones u specified. i modified it quite a bit to fit my needs. i'll c if i can find the website where i got it from. it'll give u some idea of how to get the script working without a DB.

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wont that be slow.. i have to search all the pages whenever a search is done...

Well, rather than Access why not use XML? I expect ASP has some sort of XML parser built in so it shouldn't be that hard to implement. It will make it easier to parse for you since you dont have to code it (if its built in).

If I remember correctly PHP has a way of simply reading in a file, and puts all the XML nodes/tags/contents into a tree thats really easy to use. If ASP can do that then it will make it much easier for you than reading a text file, but saves you using a database.

Plus, using XML will make it much easier to write future applications using the same file (for instance, it wouldn't take long to port it to access I doubt).

Edit: Although it depends how big the site is. If theres hundreds of pages it would be much easeir to have the content all in a database, and only use ASP (so everything dynamic anyway). Just as long as the XML files not huge.

any good XML tutorial from scrathch you know of.. eomstin like an E book.. please post links if you have any.. i have herd a lot about XML but never bothered to know what it actually is.. may be this is a good time to start it

XML tutorial

not sure what languages your into but heres an online book about processing xml with java
http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/xmljava/

ASP does support xml....i know that much. but then if u want to add xml, won;t u have to make all your pages in a way so a xml parser is ables to read them?

and as for the script being slow, it's not that slow, in a matter of fact, if customized correctly, it can be preety fast. u can see a demo and download it here. i didn;t realize i got the script from there.

I used XML with C++ in my curent project, and got a library from www.xml-parser.com

Its a great library and it comes for VB, and ASP as well as a bunch of other languages, so it should work for you. Its very easy to learn and very powerful, and I've found it extremely fast as well.

I didn't mean the ASP itself would be slow, I just meant it would take a while to go through a very large XML file node by node, rather than with a relational database.

To learn XML itself, I actually found microsoft (although normally trying to learn anything from MSDN can be a pain) to be the best source, because they have a lovely little tutorial on how it all works at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...mltutorial.asp

Also, www.devshed.net has a tutorial on XML as well (I think) in their tutorial section. Or, if none of those are any good, try www.oopweb.com :)

Its an extremely useful language to learn, because its not a programming language but a way of storing data and defining how the elements all work together. Its even more simpler than HTML because you dont care how it looks, just the data it holds.