Please point me to a tutorial on asp

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Bill Horne wrote:

> TWIMC,
> 
> I have a list of the school homeroom assignments for the coming school year,
> and I'd like to put them on my website. However, since some parents are
> skittish about having their kid's name on the Internet, I'm going set this
> up so that whomever is looking for information has to know the child's name
> in advance. In other words, I'm going to use a very basic asp setup to match
> a name input by a parent to an assignment from a flat file.
> 
> Please tell me what tutorial(s) there are that will walk me through this: it
> sounds, at least to my untrained ear, like a very basic web application.
> 
> I already have Apache up and running, and am supplying regular HTML with no
> problem.

While you can use ASP with Apache with some trickery, you might be better
off using PHP if you want to embed your programs in the middle of your
HTML).  Your Apache server should already be set up to use PHP.  So you 
would have a form to input the kid's name, and the action of the form 
would be a page with PHP code in it that would look up the kid's name and 
read them in, and the rest of the page would have PHP tags to print the 
values already read in from the file.  Or you could just have them type it 
in as part of the URL, like
   http://my.domain.tld/assignments.php?fname=Bill&lname=Clinton

Learn more about PHP here:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/
http://www.phpbuilder.com/

PHP and ASP are great for changing the content or appearance of content
dynamically, you may want to either show a page or not show a page (it's
not clear from your original post), and that's better done with other
techniques.  Bill Horne suggested CGI scripts, and that's certainly a
possibility.  Another one, which involves no programming at all, is
.htaccess files.

Using .htaccess files, you can tell Apache to make users log in before 
seeing any content in a directory.  The list of valid users can be in a 
database or a regular text file.  You can have one user or multiple users, 
you can have groups and group permissions.  It's very flexible.  To pull 
it off though, you would probably need a seoarate subdirectory for each 
kid.  

This page explains it in great detail:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/howto/auth.html



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