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Introduction There are various competing methods to implement form processing. The purpose of this project is to investigate the various methods available, to select methods that are open source, cost effective, relatively easy to learn and implement. As a practical component of this project a simple comment book will be designed and implemented using two alternative methods. Web Form Processing Technologies The technical difficulty in implementing web forms is that client side programs and server side programs must understand and work together. For web forms the client side application software is the web browser (IE or Firefox) and web sites. Usually the HTML is popular for designing web sites, and HTTP protocol (along with TCP/IP) used transmit HTML built websites. Server sides uses various HTTP server software such as Apache (usually along with Linux, and other UNIX OS), and Internet Information Services or IIS (along with MS Windows) or Sun Java System Webserver. Although many web hosting offer Linux + Apache and Widows + IIS, the decision has to be made by web designer to select one hosting solution. Once that decision is made, that will stream down web form processing technologies available to the designer. For instance, a web designer would not be able to use ASP to process web forms if his/her web site is hosted using Linux + Apache web servers. LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl/Paython) - popular and open source Scripting Language + CGI – popular and open source ASP.NET + IIS (Active Server Pages + Internet Services); along with other VBasic etc. – proprietary JSP + Sun ONE (Java Server Pages + Sun Java System Webserver) – open source (There also exist Xforms which is recommended by W3C; however, many browsers are yet to support them.) Design The purpose of the project was to compare two methods of form implementations. From range of methods available, after giving various technological consideration as discussed above two methods were selected. They are PHP + MySQL and Perl + CGI. The web page will be still be built using HTML, and scripting required would be embedded within the html page. Results and Conclusion Both methods were implemented successfully according to the design requirements outlined. Both can be test online at: http://tamilscitech.org/perlcomment.htm http://tamilscitech.org/comments.html However, the Perl implementation still requires some clean up or formatting. In comparing the two methods both methods are equivalent for a simple application such as limited comment book. However, if complex form applications are considered, then Method 1 PHP+MySQL is far superior, because it enables the user the organizing capacity of the MySQL database. On the other hand, Method II has to relay on just text file, and the processing capacity of the cgi script. For large applications the second method can burden the server resources more significantly by mandating to load or scan the data from the text files. | AJ Home | Top | Last Updated Dec/2005 | natkeeran@gmail.com | Valid-html401 |