best solution for backend work

This thread relates to one I began in May/June 02.
I posed the question 'which is better - php/mysql or cold fusion?' and after a few contrasting responses I was advised that php/mysql would be my best bet, as the support network is better and its all free :-)

Anyway I went and downloaded all the necessary software, and having spent much of the summer learning the technology (in a fairly basic manner) and designing and implementing my new website using the skills I had learned.
OK so this is just a cheap plug for my website:
http://www.kickbin.com

however I just wanted to let any potential php/mysql students know that its quite possible to integrate this technology with flash and I can't imagine cold fusion being better. I can administrate my dbs using myadmin, I have successfully linked into worldpay's credit card system and everything works tickety boo - yep the site is a teeny bit bandwidth heavy - but thats not phps fault, just I'm fussy about my fonts displaying properly - and since Macromedia still haven't sorted out the issue with shared library fonts in dynamic text fields (CMON GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER MACROMEDIA!!!) I had not option but to do a spot of embedding here and there...
Anyway thanks to the guys who helped me to make the initial decision. Can't fault ya. I did find it a headfxxxk at times I will freely admit, but php is very similar to actionscript in many respects and if nothing else... and I will make this very clear...

Learning php vastly improved my actionscript skills.

In fact the last flash contract I was involved with I could not have undertaken without the extra knowledge of scripting I picked up learning php. It was purely actionscript based, but php got me used to switches and other tricks I had never really experimented with properly in flash.

Anyway if you want to check out the results of my hard work, the link's there for you above - I won't repeat it in case I get banned or something! Any comments greatly appreciated -so long as they're all good of course.

Oh yes and if anyone has any great site promotion tips...

Thanks again for your help guys. Php is the answer.
Paul

something I forgot:
I used these books to learn and I would advise anyone to get the same two to begin:
php for the www by Larry Ullman (Visual Quickstart Guide)
php for Flash by Steve Webster (Friends of ed).
The latter is riddled (well at least smattered) with typos... ouch I spent 4 or 5 hours banging my head against the wall a couple of times. I'd still recommend it, but drop me an email on [email protected] and I'll give you a run down of the mistakes I found so you can avoid the same headaches.:eek:

Hi,

I am watching this "Loading, please wait" screen with the moving k now for a couple of minutes (N4.78, FP5, DSL Link) - the last thing it loaded was navBack.swf

Musicman

Musicman - take another look - it has done that a couple of times to me on startup - the thing is about 6 swfs deep from the word go if I remember - essential for the os as you'll see. And hey, just for me, boot up ie if you can't get it to work in Netscape. You should be laughing with dsl...hmm. I've even had the thing working on my folks' old imac with a 56k crappy bt connection. Anyway give it one more go bud, its worth it

Hi,

ok, dsl makes some things easier: where can I download IE for linux - or do you want me to buy microsoft's os to view your site :(
So, what is it that makes it work different on linux than on win or mac?

Musicman

Musicman,
I don't know why it should work differently on Linux... I designed it on a mac in X and it works fine on win and mac 9 too. hmmm must confess I don't know much about linux. It really should work though - did you give it another try??

Thats the one thing that drives me up the wall about this industry though: I am a creative person, but to do anything creative these days you have to be a master of solving cross-platform compatibility issues. I mean where's the romance in that? Now I'm not saying I'm a grand master of the arts or anything but can you imagine Van Goch having tweaked his paintings to look right under seven different sorts of lighting before being able to sit back and say he'd finished. He'd have cut the other frickin ear off too.

Kickbin,

If you stick to web standards there shouldn't be any problems. IE isn't available for Linux so people using Linux use Konqueror, Opera or Mozilla. Of these, Opera and Mozilla are available for windows and things will probably display identically on either platform. So it is not the platform that is the problem, more likely the browser. If you test your designs in a current version of Mozilla and IE, it will most likely be available to the majority of users as these browsers adhere to W3C recommendations. You should be aware of these issues as a web designer, but if you don't think you can cut it, go and be a fine artist and make trash like Tracey Emin :P

Tried NS 7.0 and Mozilla 1.1 on BSD, and Mozilla 1.2a on Linux... Same thing happened... it stops at 'Status: Loading please wait' part, and refuses to go further...

When I refreshed, it managed to load, and it worked fine...

Also, it appears that it have focus problems with the popup...

Btw. remove popups... people are annoyed by them...

Cheers...

Hi bobajobrob,

maybe you missed the point there - the problem is not about different html / javascript behaviour but rather about different flash player behaviour.
There are a few rules to make flash work in every browser, say one should not use backslashes in urls even if IE might fix them, and there is no guarantee that loading an external movie does produce a reasonable bytestotal initially, and also the exact state of a movie at the time the page's onload event happens may differ.
Once a movie plays well in both ie and ns and on both win and mac, neither of these problems would be there.
There is a linux-specific problem with version detectors: some of them assume that all player id's are three chars, like WIN and MAC, and fail on UNIX; this is not the case with kickbin's site either.
It looks like either a very obscure error in the movies or a possible bug in the linux player

Musicman

Yes you're quite right - I quite often miss the point.

I've got mandrake on my laptop but I never got round to testing the site in question :P I suppose it's quite reasonable to have platform issues in software (plugin) that has to re-written for each platform.