Need help to start...

Dear all,

I'm a application developer but I'm new to web-based application development. Can anyone let me know how to start this up? All I know was the it's about 3-tiers architectures with a database server, application server and a client brower. Can anyone let me know the relationship about them and how can I set up these servers and make them work.

I'm new to the web technologies and I don't know much on those XMLs, EJB, etc...

Any help is appreciated.

Mike

Would you describe in more details what is that exactly you want to do?

There are about 1 million answers to your question, but here is some basic information. Obviously the application server will run your program code, the database server will store your database data. The web server will serve the pages you code to the users (or client), and the client is the browser you use. When they talk about these servers they can be on the same physical computer, larger application may use different machines.

The relationship is basically the web server serves up the pages to the browser, the application server will process you code on the server and push the results to the client through the web server. The database server typically will not directly interact with the client, but will sit behind the application server and serve data to the program.

Depending on the language you intend on programming in will depend a lot on the answers. For example here if you were going to be programming in PHP using mySQL Database server (A very powerful combination, pretty easy to learn, and free Open Source). You could setup a web server on your local development computer to learn. Later you will need to find a public computer if you do not have one yet.

One of the easiest ways to setup is to use an install program that will install everything for you like PHPTriad (http://www.phpgeek.com/). To learn the installs you can download each and install:
Apache Web Server - http://httpd.apache.org/
PHP - http://www.php.net/
mySQL - http://www.mysql.com
phpMyAdmin - http://phpwizard.net/projects/phpMyAdmin/

Once installed on your PC you are ready to get started, there are many basic tutorials out there http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Tips_and_Tutorials/.


I hope this helps,

Scott

Thanks for the fruitful information. It seems I have a long way to go.

Can I set up a say, win 2000 professional or winxp environment in order to make all these servers in a single machine? Or they all depends on the OS.

Actually what I want to do is to set up a machine, have these DB/servers installed and try to write some code and have a look and feel before I do some serious stuff for my project.

As I used to work in the client/server side, I don't have much idea on set up web applications.

Thanks for any help.
Regards,
Mike

Those 'relations' of 3 tiers... it is pure logical approach. They are not separated in no way. Thus only servers you need is http and some db.

mike.chan,

I have my development system build on a Win2000 machine and have had it built on a Win98 machine in the past. My production / live servers are typically Linux based. The key I have found is to try and match the development machine as closely to the production server I plan to use. My dev and live servers both have the same configuration except one is Win2K and the other Linux. This way when you are testing your programs you do not upload to a live server and find it doesn't work because they are using X server and you are using Y. For this reason I use Apache web server on dev, most web servers for live are Apache if you are planning to use a Linux based server. PHP and mySQL both run fine on a windows based machine, so you will have a pretty good match to a live server.

As far as the shift in concept to programming for the web, typically the basic principals apply. Once you get the dev server up and running (phpTriad) will help that a lot, you can start with some basic scripts to get the hang of the process. With PHP the basic process is to make a static web page using HTML and then you can embed PHP code into the page to make it do something.

Hope this helps,

Scott