best method for my situation??

[kev]

HELP! My head is swimming from all these choices available to me. I need a little input for the best method of creating a data-driven, ecommerce website.

Here's the situation, my client sells performance parts for Mustangs, he sells numerous items from about 50 vendors (lots of items to keep track of). I run a G4 Mac with Macromedia MX Studio and FM Pro v.6. My partner runs a PC with MX Studio and ColdFusion.

I want to create a navigation using Flash and use ColdFusion to interact with the database. Is FM Pro a good choice for creating the database for this application? How well does FM Pro play with ColdFusion? What other recommendations would you suggest?

Thanks for any help you can offer. Kevin.

[Anatoli]

IMHO Much better will be:

Lasso/MySQL combo and FileMaker. Fast, secure and cross-platform.

With Flash you will lose some 5-20% of visitors, which are bored to death with Flash navigation.

[LiveOak]

What about php/MySQL?

-bd

[Garry Claridge]

php/MySQL runs well on OS X

php can even talk to FM.

All the best.

Garry

[Steve T.]

Hi, kev! I'm no expert like Anatoli/LiveOak/Garry, but it seems to me that you and your partner are Macromedia-wise and would probably rather not stray too far from what you already know. If this is true and you don't want to (or can't afford to invest the time to) learn how to set-up and run an AMP Apache-MySQL-PHP site and the site will be in-house, relatively low volume, and managed by yourself, I would concur with Anatoli that you look into Lasso. If you are familiar with CDML, I hear transitioning to Lasso isn't difficult since CDML is Lasso-lite and you can even use CDML in your pages.

On another note, I have not used it and have heard folks complain about the price, but there is a FileMaker ecommerce package called ch-ching (or something similar) that will let you stick w/FileMaker for ecommerce. Maybe look into that or search for people's experiences with it. Of course, FileMaker Pro - Unlimited isn't cheap either and you'll probably need that, too.

If "performance parts for mustangs" is high volume and/or you will be searching for a host, then I say go w/an AMP unless you mange to get ColdFusion working the way you want. I don't think many folks know too much about ColdFusion/FileMaker Pro combos. Please let us know how it goes if you do end up going this route.

Good Luck!

--ST

[Anatoli]

IMHO -- Lasso 6 outperforms ColdFusion and it is beautifully cross-platform.

php has much steep learning curve, but it is free.

If you want to protect your source code, php costs 2 times more, than Lasso.

[omiossec]

In fact when you want to use all feature include in lasso you need to buy Zeus licence which can be more expensive than lasso