Database using PHP+CSS+HTML UI: does it really work?

On 27 Aug 2000 Aaron Heidel wrote: > At work, I'm helping to design an inventory system, and we're > thinking of using Oracle + PHP4 + CSS + HTML. I'm trying to determine > what kind of UI I can hope for when I limit myself to CSS forms and > PHP. Does anyone have, or know of any examples of this that inspire > hope? Dunno if I can inspire hope, but I am working on a project using similar tools, and I have had reasonable success. The trick is that I am also using ALOT of javascripts and don't expect as much from the interface as you may. I use javascript for verifying forms when the user clicks the "submit" button (actualy just a type="button" with an associated onclick="submitscript()" which includes a form.submit()), creating pop-up windows to gather more form data, and destroying these windows when I am through with them, etc... it has become rather complex. I am using PHP to dynamically generate javascript which dynamically generates HTML (with document.write) based on both database queries and user input. I have seen it go further than this and have the server-side scripts be generated dynamically too. I suppose it would help to know what sort of interface you hope to have in the end. If you want something really robust and responsive, I suggest you 1) go with a Java applet and plug that into a JDBC connection, or 2) expect to have alot of complex javascripts and place a minimmum browser requirement on the user (IE 5, for example, would make your job easier as you can muck with a page which has already been loaded w/ javascript and CSS/JSS. Other reasons exist as well). At work we always end up coming down to one of these two options. I have seen beautiful stuff come out of both, but as a hint, java has the data structures and graphical representation you will need to do a really slick display of information, and it will be slower to use than a 486 SX if you don't push the data to the client and then manipulate it there. > CSS seems to promise to give us flexibility in designing the forms. I dunno if CSS has given me ANY benefits when it comes to forms specifically, it does make the rest of the layout and decoration much sweeter though. Steve