--- Steve Fosdick fozzy@pelvoux.demon.co.uk wrote:

On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 03:02:07PM -0700, David Freeman wrote:

...

--- brodders@cwcom.net wrote:

...

d) IF not web based - um, how's it going to work??

The big advantage of a web system is that is doesn't require any additional software to be installed on the clients - prospective clients should already have a web browser (and with care we can work with any reasonable one) and if not we still don't have to write it - it's just a case of installing it.

Exactly, If we make the system well it should work on any browser, even IE :o)

The other options are:

1. Use the database's client server feature. The server machine just runs a database with no other specialised software and a small client is written using the revalent database library which then communicates over a TCP connection to the database server.

   I know MySQL has this feature - it can be used for remote query sessions too. PostgreSQL has it too.

Down side - requires yet another app to be installed.

2. Another protocol or RPC mechanism where a client program talks to

a dedicated server process on the server machine which in turn communicates with the database.

This last approach can be flexible and can have low bandwidth requirements but it would be the most work of any of them.

<fx action=something going over my head> RPC sounds difficult. I think web based will be best.

...

Badly? We want solutions not problems, ne ideas?

Oh dear! This kind of speak is the worst kind of management clich�.

Sorry, forgot the :o) . Also please don't accuse me of being a manager, I still have some (if limited) technically abilities :o)

...

We also need to consider who has access to change/add things?

Oh, so you probably want to define a set of priveleges and add a "roles" table. How you model the next bit is open to debate. You could have a many-to-one relationship between users and roles (many users belong to one role, one role only per user) in which case some roles have to include all the privileges of lesser roles. The other way is to have a many-many between users and roles (thus a link table). You could have a separate privileges table (almost a link table) which lists role/priv pairs or you could make the privs columns of the roles table.

We basically have two levels, people browsing for available books, and a librarian to add things.

also I thought of another table

reservation(member no., resource number, received) member no. and resource number = composite key = integers recieved = boolean.

Thanks

D

Steve

__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/