HELP figuring out a good 3rd year uni project title

[Mattmans1]

Hello to all at daniweb.com. I'm really hoping someone here can help me out. I need to complete a final year project at uni to graduate, i have taken database design and administration last year as a module which covers microsoft enteprise manager, creating tables, relationships, stored prcedures and triggers etc, i have touched oracle and i am use to writing sql statements. This year Im doing database design and administration which so far has alot of modelling in it. Great lol.

I'm not really all that clued up on what to do my project on, it can be either an application based project where i built something and document it, or it can be a research based project.

WHERE THE HELL DO I START??!??! lol

Does anybody have any suggestions for a suitable project? it needs to be of deciant complection, i need to hand in a specification in a week :(

An idea that i just thought of is as follows. There is a small local DIY shop down the road, they sell everything from car wheels to WD40. Say they wanted to start selling there stuff online. i create a relational database, add all the data necessary. Then i would need to connect the database to the website?? how would i do this? what would i need to learn?

i know nothing about websites really but i am willing to learn and fast! lol, could anybody put me i nthe right direction of what i need to learn to be able to do this, with a little explination of what will do what.

I know for some of you this will be easy, but i really want to learn something new that will give me skills for employment in the next 2 years or so. thanks all, hope i have made a little sense atleast!!

Thanks

Mattmans1

[dickersonka]

well it sounds like you have your idea already

your spec should say what the existing company has, what you are going to do for them, what they will be able to do when you finish, and how you will accomplish this

as far as the website it will be a good stepping stone "into the real world"

you have a few options
probably the most popular and best languages for the task would be asp.net, php, or jsp

you familiar with java or .net? or experienced with a scripting language?

[Mattmans1]

I'm afraid i have no experiance at all with any of that. I can create a database easy enough and query database using sql statements but thats about it. Will php do the job of transfering my database to a website? an example is ebuyer, they have there products on there site, we click on what we want and its added to a shopping cart, i know there's is way more advanced than what i want to do for now, but will php do what i need it to do? also how hard will it be to learn php?

I'm very newb at scripting so a breif overview of what i will have to do/learn would be great

i appreciate anybodys input o nthe matter as i will be spending all week thinking about this.

thankyou

[dickersonka]

ok lets start with the database side then, which db are you more familiar with mysql, mssql, oracle, something else?

since you are just starting, i would recommend php, asp.net is good just a bit to learn in a hurry, jsp might be confusing to just dive right in, php at least seems like a good start

good tutorial would be at php's site, search google for php tutorial and you will find plenty
http://us.php.net/tut.php

php will do what you need to do, many commercial and personal sites are done in it, its not necessarily hard to learn, just takes patience and time as does any language

[Mattmans1]

I have been using enterprise manager at uni, im guessing thats microsoft? then used the query analyzer to run statements, i have also used oracle 10g to create tables and add relationships etc. I think ill stick with microsoft version. Thats brilliant mate, ill go into uni tomorrow and ask a few tutors about the task that lies ahead (absolutley massive for me lol) but atleast i know what i need to do. Is there a certain bit of php i need to learn (for example the transfering of data from a database into a php script), or do i need to learn the whole lot?

[dickersonka]

sounds good, stick with mssql

take a look at here
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.mssql-query.php

its the querying aspect of php with mssql

its hard to say what you need to know, but a majority of it will be mssql_query, displaying data, and inputting data

after that all done, lol you should be about done with your project already