Hi, I'm trying to develop an Education based web-site currently using PHP,MySQL,Javascript, XML,HTML (natrually) and Ajax. Although I've got 25 years system/applications software development experience with a plethera of languages and hardware/softwarer platforms I haven't developed anything serious for about 15 (yes 15) years. The learning curve here is massive. I came across REBOL a few years ago. I didn't really understand it. Being a little more serious with a definite goal in mind REBOL seems to be a very appropriate language to use. Clearly having a scripting language that works on both the client and the server is a huge advantage. I assume (from a few examples I've seen) that access to MySQL is no problem? Can someone confirm this for me? REBOL can handle browser forms (even elegantly)? Again can someone confirm this for me? My biggest concern is hosting - as I'm based in the UK and what I'm developing will be for UK based educationalists it makes sense to use a UK based web hosting company. Any ideas? Any guidance is much appreciated. I've no doubt that should I use REBOL I will be be visiting this forum often. Thanks - dambuster.
Welcome. Many Rebol users will be using Cheyenne ( http://www.cheyenne-server.org ) as their choice of web server and delivering content using RSP ( Rebol Server Page ) in stead of PHP. This means you can use Rebol on the server, and also to generate the web content dynamically. Cheyenne works with an valid Rebol database source such as ODBC, and Mysql. It doesn't matter much where your intended audience is ... as long as your host allows you to run your own web server instead of Apache. Browser ( html ) forms are easy enough ... The reality is though that you still need to learn JavaScript and HTML and most likely SQL
If you have a server AND you can install Rebol core executable, you can use Rebol as a CGI script. Look at this page with a lot of useful informations: http://www.rebol.com/docs/cgi1.html
Hi Dambuster, I've been using REBOL CGI for years. I've only used http://lunarpages.com for hosting, but I've heard that others use Hostgator. There's a thread at http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlKJPF about using Hostgator. New versions of REBOL have native MySQL access, but the driver at http://softinnov.org/rebol/mysql.shtml is stable and popular, and it runs in older versions of REBOL. My tutorial at http://re-bol.com has many general examples to help get started with REBOL CGI programming, including plenty of examples about using GET and POST data from web forms, as well as binary data from multipart forms, and just about everything else that I've needed to make REBOL work well for web sites over the years. Take a look at http://rebolforum.com (you can download the source of the forum directly from the CGI program), and take a look at my sitebuilder.cgi script at http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=sitebuilder.cgi . That program is documented in a case study in the http://re-bol.com tutorial, along with many others. I also wrote a separate little tutorial at http://re-bol.com/cgi_tutorial.txt with some more specifics about getting up and running with Lunarpages.
