I need to create a database driven cd. I currently have a autoloader CD that is essentially a mini website that I am distributing via CD. The current version has about the equivalent of 200 static html pages that people can click through. A large portion of the content is a product listing broken into multiple categories. I need to update this to version 2.0. In this update, I want to change some of the content, but I want to put this product listing into a database so it is a) easier to update, and b) sortable, searchable, flexible based on the viewer's desire. I have no idea how to do this. My questions are theses... 1) What are the technologies that I should be looking to? Flash? Access? Director? 2) I have an in-house IT person who is capable but this is not his forte. Should I ask him to try to figure it out? Is there someone on this forum that has experience to do this? I have a budget for this, but I'm a non-profit organization so this is not a large budget by any means. Any feedback would be most appreciated. Thanks!
i have done this before with delphi and sql lite both of which are fairly easy to learn. flash would be great but i don't think you can access a database with it, at least not one thats on the cd. Director should work http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_16226&sliceId=2 the other option is to build it for the cd, you could create a small script (php,perl,asp etc) and have it running on your computer you would just make database changes locally and it would build all the pages for you to include on the cd. the search engine might be a bit harder, you may be able to pull it of in javascript.
So you're basically after a 'server on a CD', right? There's LAMPPIX ( http://lamppix.tinowagner.com/ ) that gives you Apache, MySQL, PHP and so on. There's an article at http://www.joomla.org/content/view/512/49/ which may or may not help you with doing what you want. Unfortunately, LAMPPIX requires a reboot to use it. I'm 99% sure there are solutions out there that don't require a reboot but for the life of me I can't find any of them. If you search for "server on a CD" you should have a good start. I like these options because it takes care of the MySQL stuff (it just won't write anything back to the CD, or at least you lose those changes after rebooting).
I have to think there are either easier solutions. Is there anyone out there that knows how to do this? Possibly interested in this as a project?
Has anyone used this program? http://www.outsite-in.com/ It looks interesting for this type of application.
I'm glad you posted to this thread again (and that I was subscribed to it). I've never used any of the solutions but Outsite-In has been around for some time so I daresay it's fairly stable. As luck would have it, for some reason I was looking in the 'freebies' section on this very forum the other day (something I never do) and what came up? Server2Go at http://www.server2go-web.de . It doesn't require a reboot, either, but it's free. The link that I found in the forum itself is http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=483270 . Hope that helps!
Thanks. I'll take a look at it. Nice thing about Outsite-In is that for non-profit companies (I work for a non-profit), they have a free license for their basic service. So I'll be trying that out too. I'll post when I know how it goes. Thanks.