Re: [PHP] Where to start!

On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 13:42 -0400, tedd wrote:
> At 10:14 AM -0400 5/6/08, Andrew Ballard wrote:
> >On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 9:21 AM, tedd <[email protected]> wrote:
> >I will respectfully (though strongly) disagree here, tedd. If you are
> >building a guest book and all you need is a place to "store and
> >retrieve stuff," store it in a file rather than a database. If you
> >only have one form to collect and store information, this will be more
> >than sufficient.
> >
> >If you are doing something more complex where you need to relate
> >information (say, for example, forum members <-> forum topics <->
> >forum messages, or customers <-> orders <-> items, etc.) then you are
> >far better off to think about what you need to store and plan your
> >database first. Doing that will make your data model much better from
> >the start, and you can also start planning out what your HTML pages
> >need to be collecting as it relates to how the data is stored.
> >
> >Andrew
> 
> Andrew:
> 
> Well, you can certainly disagree -- we all do things differently. 
> What works for me, doesn't work for you and vise versa -- but that's 
> the way of things.
> 
> I understand relational dB's and how to use them, but I don't think 
> the OP was talking about that, but rather getting something much more 
> simple up and running.
> 
> Rob, who I respect greatly, said that 90 percent of what you are 
> doing should be decided before you start programming. But, I never 
> work that way either.
> 
> I always jump right in and use the computer to design stuff. I never 
> resort to making a story-book layout or poster board work-up or 
> anything like that. I just don't work that way.

I don't do much of that either unless I want to sort some complex things
out that aren't easy to visualize in my head. When I say 90% of your DB
should be designed before you start writing code... well, I usually
thinking about the create statements (I guess some people might call
those code), not drawing charts :)

Cheers,
Rob.
-- 
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Application and Templating Framework for PHP