Access to Web?

[elizabeth]

I'm cross-posting this to the Access forum. <br><br>I'm an Access Developer and am interested in programming web sites, initially for my own business but then as an extention of my professional services. Have any advice about the best path for this? I've begun reading about ASP, ColdFusion and Dreamweaver and all claim to have important advantages, but being new to this it's hard for me to judge. I'm looking for something that (1) integrates well with Access so I can build on that familiarity, (2) is a professional and robust&nbsp;&nbsp;technology with a &quot;future&quot; as far as marketability and (3) is a good tool.

 

[palbano]

Dear elizabeth,<br><br>Well unfortunately your 3 criteria don't clearly distinguish a winner from the list you mentioned. Unless you interpret, &quot;familiarity with Access&quot; to include VBScript knowledge and &quot;robust technology with a 'future' as far as marketability&quot;, to mean what I think it means (Microsoft)then you can probably make a good argument for ASP vs the other two.<br><br>A criteria of more weight in my opinion are Early adoption and integration with new technology. With all the new technology coming from MS for network related application development you can be sure that IIS will be well integrated at the very start with all of the latest tools protocols, etc., from Microsoft.<br><br>&quot;But that's just my opinion... I could be wrong&quot;.<br><br>&gt; initially for my own business<br><br>What is your &quot;own business&quot;? If you don't mind?<br><br>-pete<br>

 

[elizabeth]

pete, thanks for the tips. I'm currently an employee but have listed myself in the local yellow pages for BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) and Access db Development (see my profile). I have a domain name and would like to build my own web page for this business. When I become more familiar with web technology I'd like to offer web-enabled Access database programming to clients as well.

 

[carpeliam]

With Access being somewhat OS-specific, would that be the best db program to be doing on the web when many clients are running Apache or something else? I'm not sure.. I guess if Access is what you do, that's what you do, and you'd know more about DB portability than I would.. just a thought. <p>Liam Morley<br><a href=mailto:lmorley@wpi.edu>lmorley@wpi.edu</a><br><a href=

http://www.wpi.edu/~lmorley/>

] :: imotic :: website :: [</a><br>"light the deep, and bring silence to the world.<br>
light the world, and bring depth to the silence.

 

[Zelandakh]

Elizabeth,<br><br>We have been testing Access databases on the Net and have been quite successful although I have not tested them on non Windows &quot;servers&quot;. Hosting the database on Apache may not work!<br><br>Create everything you need in Access including queries and mock up forms to test the functionality.<br><br>Get a copy of something you'll pick up easily like Frontpage 2000 and use that to create ASPs that link into the database to give you the web forms.<br><br>It works slightly differently to Access but once you get the links right (don't forget about security!) into the database you will have no problems creating dbases on the web.<br><br>We don't actually use Frontpage, but use Dreamweaver UltraDev instead. <p>Zel<br><a href=mailto:zel@zelandakh.co.uk>zel@zelandakh.co.uk</a><br><a href= > </a><br>

 

[elizabeth]

Yes, I think I'll stick with Access for the moment as my strength is more in solving the business problem than in finding an optimum technical solution. I already own FrontPage2000 (never installed it) so Zel I'll take your advice and try that first if it will help me ease into ASP.

 

[hallm]

There are a couple of third party programs that will create webpages from access if that is all that you are needing.&nbsp;&nbsp;Done correctly I've set some customers up that way so that they didn't need an NT Server.&nbsp;&nbsp;Access2Web is the best I've used.&nbsp;&nbsp;I forget their web address but you can do a search for the program at downloads.com.&nbsp;&nbsp;I think it's about $80.00 and only requires knowledge of html to link to the database.&nbsp;&nbsp;But ASP seems to be a better method of setting up a database driven site.&nbsp;&nbsp;There are plenty of sites that have tutorials and the asp forum on this site is the best I've seen.&nbsp;&nbsp;I've built a database with no prior asp experience (just a little Visual Basic experience) in about two weeks just by looking at other code and asking questings on this site.