At 10:14 AM -0400 5/6/08, Andrew Ballard wrote:
>On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 9:21 AM, tedd <tedd.sperling@gmail.com> wrote:
>I will respectfully (though strongly) disagree here, tedd. If you are
>building a guest book and all you need is a place to "store and
>retrieve stuff," store it in a file rather than a database. If you
>only have one form to collect and store information, this will be more
>than sufficient.
>
>If you are doing something more complex where you need to relate
>information (say, for example, forum members <-> forum topics <->
>forum messages, or customers <-> orders <-> items, etc.) then you are
>far better off to think about what you need to store and plan your
>database first. Doing that will make your data model much better from
>the start, and you can also start planning out what your HTML pages
>need to be collecting as it relates to how the data is stored.
>
>Andrew

Andrew:

Well, you can certainly disagree -- we all do things differently.
What works for me, doesn't work for you and vise versa -- but that's
the way of things.

I understand relational dB's and how to use them, but I don't think
the OP was talking about that, but rather getting something much more
simple up and running.

Rob, who I respect greatly, said that 90 percent of what you are
doing should be decided before you start programming. But, I never
work that way either.

I always jump right in and use the computer to design stuff. I never
resort to making a story-book layout or poster board work-up or
anything like that. I just don't work that way.

Sure, people can criticize the way I do things if they want, but I
still get things done that work and are usually under budget with
respect to money and time -- so I must be doing something right.

From my perspective, it's far better for a newbie to actually produce
something than it is to get lost in the details and never see
anything materialize. Besides, trial and error is a great way to
learn.

Oh, and I seldom use the file system for anything. MySQL works just
fine for storing things. I'm even considering Stut's recommendation
to use a dB rather than sessions -- I think there is real value there.

In any event, different strokes for different folks -- happy coding. :-)

Cheers,

tedd


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