Looking for Expert Help

I am looking to build an interactive searchable database for over 40,000 records, and display the records in a graphical format with details and photos. I know this DB size is too much for Access. I also would like it to be self contained on a CD-ROM. I was planning to use HTML as the interface and have a DB in the background. Can I do this on a CD without installing anything on the Client? And what would be the best method.

Thanks.

What programming languages do you know?

I recently developed a cd-based company database called the Book of Lists. This was for my work (link can be found in sig). This is a PHP project that uses XML as its datasource. If you learn XSLT (very easy, only takes about an hour) you can make it seem to do simple queries. If you Search for a Company in the demo you can see how complex you can make the searches with XSLT.

doing it this way is heaps easier than using a database.

Thanks for the insight, I am not a XML master, not even close to a beginner. I liked your demo and it also what I need. I would use more of a web page look with the optional search and drop down menus. What does this do as far a licensing issues? For distribution etc.
Thanks again for all your help. Any more information would be a great help.

Thanks again.

XML is a easy to learn. I didnt know any before i did that project.

Its meant to be used as a datasource and so its very much free as to what you can do.

<Companies>
<Company>
<Name>Johns fish</Name>
<Open>9:00am</Open>
<Close>6:00pm</Close>
</Company>
</Companies>

You can specify whatever name you want for the tags. The hardest part is learning the XSLT.

Thanks again.

Is there any good online information about XSLT?

XML data would be saved in a standard PHP or HTML file?

Any limits on the datasource?
Photo, Video, Web links, ETC.

To contain this on a CD anything I would need to put on the CD to make it work?

Thanks again.

Well you said that you want to have an interactive searchable database. What language are you thinking of doing your code in. PHP, ASP, Visual Basic, Javascript, Java, Perl?

All the above can access XML. You may need extra software on the CD to make some of them work (Perl, ASP, PHP all need an interpreter). Javascript will run in the browser but the problem is that you will be using browser specific code half the time and the user will need to have the correct browser. Visual Basic and Java can be used but they can be a bit of a pain.

I used PHP and used Visual Basic to load Xitami as the webserver so i could parse the PHP pages. It works really well. Took me several days to get the VB code right to work on all versions of windows though. I then wrote a script (Visual Basic) that generated the XML from the database and used XSLT and Sablotron to convert it to HTML. The XML data is its own file and is loaded by the script.

The way it works is you have the data in XML, you have a formatting information template in XSLT and then use something like Sablotron to merge the two together and produces HTML. You cant have binary data in the XML though. You can have references to parts on the file system (eg /images/myface.jpg) and then use the XSLT to put that in an image tag.

Where to go for XSLT tutorials, Devshed of couse!

XSLT transformation with PHP and Sablotron: http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/...rans/page1.html
XSL Basics, Part 1: http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/...ics1/page1.html
XSL Basics, Part 2: http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/...ics2/page1.html
XML Basics, Part 1: http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/...sic1/page1.html
XML Basics, Part 2: http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/...sic2/page1.html