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These are PHP Web pages that act as general-purpose database clients. This means to use them you need to have both (1) access to a MySQL database server, and (2) a Web server that supports PHP, either available to you or on the local machine. The pages obviously can be hosted on a public Web site, but they are actually meant for use on an intranet for accessing and maintaining databases, not to serve as public access pages (for security reasons).
PHP, based on Perl, is a very convenient medium for developing server-side applications, and current versions of PHP support database access through the MySQL database engine. This means developing database clients takes only a small amount of time, and the user interface looks as good as your favorite Web browser.
These pages do nearly as much as my Java database client program
DataProspector.
The advantage of
DataProspector
is that you don't have to host a PHP-enabled Web server to use it. The advantage to these PHP pages is that you can easily customize them to suit yourself, and you don't have to host a Java runtime engine to use them.
These pages may also help you understand PHP page design, if you are interested in this kind of programming.
dbsearch.php is a convenient read-only database access client that supports sophisticated query design. It also automatically formats mailing addresses, copyable from the page, allowing easy access to infrequently-needed addresses. If this feature doesn't work for you it will be because my address field names aren't the same as yours. In this case, edit the page and change the field names located in "$addressNames" to agree with your database field names.
dbwriter.php is meant to permit the creation and editing of database records, so it has a different purpose (it can write to the database), but it has a similar design. It presents a row display of database fields (see above) and it supports multiline fields (as does MySQL).
It was while designing these pages that I took time out to update my programmer's workshop Arachnophilia to better support PHP page development. This kind of development has special requirements — among other things, you have to preview the page in a Web server context in order to test your code. The current Arachnophilia knows how to do this.
Oh, yes, the
other
good news. These pages are offered as
CareWare
— that means no money, now or ever. You just have to care.
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