The Reason I’m Driven To This
I just figured out what I’m doing here. I drove myself to this programming challenge, as I said before, to keep up with my studies in web design even though I’m not taking any classes this semester, but also to force myself to review what I learned in Fall 2004, and force myself finally, to “hook up” my database sources and get to really understand this thing that has caused me such confusion.
This “thing”, by which I mean connecting to databases. It’s been my greatest obstacle since I began learning about database-driven applications and operating systems other than Microsoft.
I hope I’m not boring you.
I’ve been dancing around this programming challenge, and you’re sitting back waiting for me to do something magical. Pull a program out of my hat that will do all the things, and more, that we want to see in this application. But that’s not going to happen just yet. There’s only so many hours in the day, and I’m doing other things in some of those hours, so you can expect to watch me dance a whole lot more around this challenge.
I tend to do this in everything in life. But for your benefit, I’ll try to get to the point soon. I’ll make unilateral decisions and drive this challenge all the way to completion, reviewing my studies in databases, information architecture, web usability, w3C standards-compliant web design, and all the rest!
Obviously, I’ve chosen a very simple way to introduce lots of concepts, many quite complex, to the overall building of a program or application. There’s the Document Object Model, which you really should have a pretty good understanding of, if you’re going to get anything out of what I’m doing here. There are Document Type Declarations that make browsers do different things. These fall under w3C standards-compliance. It’s good to make sure your application looks similar in different browsers, or at least degrades gracefully.
Then there are the applications/programs/?? we need for this: PHP, MySQL, SQL, Some data source such as ODBC, — I’m already getting in way over my head here —
I really don’t know how to look at this part of the challenge yet. But at the same time, this part is where we can decide how the data gets piped in and out of our application. This is part of the structural framework of it, isn’t it?
As you can tell, I’m doing this completely on-the-fly. I hope that the learning process will be beneficial to both of us; you, the reader whoever you might be, and me. (How could you possibly be reading this far? I thought I lost you three days ago!) So let me figure this out right here, right now:
I’ll be needing a database. My host has one for me. I’m using it for this blog application. All I have to do there, is to what… go into my phpMyAdmin 2.2.2 from my MySQL database manager screen just off of the hosting control panel. Are you following me so far? I’m not.
There’s still a matter of concern for me, and that is, that I don’t have my local computer’s directory structure mirroring that at my host’s server. I don’t have my local computer properly configured for local testing. I haven’t been able to pull this together. This is the “thing” I was mentioning above. This is why Fall 2004 wasn’t much of a learning experience for me. I never got to do some of the things the book talked about,(etc.)
I have Dreamweaver, and continually plug away at it in many uses. I rely on it for reference all the time. But I’ve been waiting to buy a full-blown copy of Macromedia StudioMX with FlashMX 2004 Professional, so that I’ll have ColdFusion and all that that entails too, and I’ll once and for all understand how to connect to data sources, and harness all that power!
In the meantime, we can move on to other considerations for this exercise, and keep the aforementioned in mind while considering. There’s still a lot I need to learn about Dreamweaver and ColdFusion, and Flash and ActionScript, but maybe that’s one more reason I’m driven to this. That I’ve been hesitant to commit to the $999 price tag of StudioMX.
And I’m driven to asking whether StudioMX is going to be the “be-all-end-all” tool that will initiate me fully to the level of web designer/webmaster/computer geek. And is that really what I want to be? Here I am dancing again.
