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I have some very initial and conceptual questions to ask you. I'm doing a very simple conference site in HTML/CSS. It only has some additional JavaScript/jQuery. Now I want to implement a submission form, and I know that the "visual" part of it is straightforward using HTML. The thing is, of course I want to collect the data from the submissions, and so I want to know if it is absolutely mandatory that I have a database in the server side to collect it? Since there will be a maximum of 35 submissions, it would be enough for me a solution involving sending an e-mail with each submission data (encrypted) to the conference e-mail address. So, do I have to code and SQL database (plus using something like PHP or Ruby, for instance), or can I skip that?

Thank you very much, João Fernandes

João Fernandes
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2 Answers2

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The thing is, of course I want to collect the data from the submissions, and so I want to know if it is absolutely mandatory that I have a database in the server side to collect it?

No. Databases are useful for solving lots of problems, but they aren't mandatory.

Since there will be a maximum of 35 submissions, it would be enough for me a solution involving sending an e-mail with each submission data (encrypted) to the conference e-mail address.

If you are going straight to email, and you have only a small number of sets of data (so there won't be much manual labour generated) then that sounds fine.

So, do I have to code and SQL database (plus using something like PHP or Ruby, for instance), or can I skip that?

You don't need a database. You do need something (which could be written in Perl, PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, or any other programming language) to process the submitted form data and send the email.

Quentin
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    As an in-between solution, you could have a server-side form handler that just checks the data according to some criteria and writes it to a plain text file in append mode, using e.g. TAB characters between fields and one line per submission, so that you get a TSV (tab-separated values) file that can be opened in Excel or parsed and processed with a very simple program. – Jukka K. Korpela Nov 21 '12 at 13:35
  • Thanks for all your kind and quick answers. I followed @Quentin's suggestion, and looked for a script. To anyone with the same doubts as myself, you can look in http://www.javascript-coder.com/html-form/html-form-tutorial-p1.phtml for an HTML form tutorial for beginners. In the end, it suggests a couple of scripts to process the data from your form. I chose FormMail, PHP flavour. Regarding this, here is a very useful guide about it: http://www.tectite.com/terry_allen_guide/web-content/index.html – João Fernandes Dec 06 '12 at 18:00
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João,

The best proper way to do this its using MySQL. You can use, for example, XML or a txt file to save this information, but the proper way to do this its with MySQL. Your information goes more organized though.

Lucas Veiga
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