NPCER: need advice on coding/programming question

[ttt]

(Apologies in advance for the vagueness)

I want to build a site that contains a database of documents where you can search by certain tags. Like, I could search for Characteristic A, and it would pull up all of the documents that include Characteristic A. 

What skills would I need to build this? I know HTML and CSS, but I don't have database skills. What would I need to learn in order to create something like this? 

[EllieArroway]

You would need a backend database - likely SQL

And middleware to connect the backend to the UI - Java or similar

[Deleted]

SQL and Java would be the easiest way to do it probably. There's likely a better middleware but I haven't coded a website since the early 2000s so I'm not up on it.

Definitely SQL on the back. It's my favorite.

[2curlydogs]

Definitely SQL backend. You can go free with mySQL.

Back-end development language - my preference is C#. I'm laughing that Java is easier cause I haaaaaaaated Java. We had to use it in school and I wanted to punch James Gosling in the face every time I mistyped 'public static void main' as 'public static void mail' and spent minutes/hours trying to figure out why shit wouldn't compile.

Ahem.

Anyway, your DB would probably be relatively simple. a one-to-many relationship between your main table (columns would be: id, document name, document location, a few other things unique to each doc) and a separate 2-col table (doc id, which would be a foreign key to your main table, and then the tag associated with that id).

Actually, make that tag id, which is also a FK to a 3rd table where you have your list of tag definitions. I'm assuming you don't want those free-form text to reduce user error.

[fortnightlily]

Do you know Javascript? There are some server-side Javascript libraries with lightweight NoSQL databases that could handle something simple. Meteor is one of them. www.meteor.com/ Maybe Enyo or Derby. I haven't looked into them that closely.

[2curlydogs]

Alternatively, if you know that your documents are going to have a 1:1 relationship with a tag, you could go with something hella simple like a JSON array.

[fortnightlily]

Depending on where you want to store the documents, you might be also to just do something like throw 'em on Google Drive and use their API to search and retrieve them. developers.google.com/drive/

[fortnightlily]

Or, use a simple CMS like Wordpress and attach your documents to posts and tag the posts and just use their built in search. Other CMS's can probably do this for you too. Drupal, likely, though the learning curve might be higher.

[ttt]

What I want to do is similar to a database of book characters. So, like you would search for male, middle aged, African American, professor or teacher, and it would give you a list of books that have a character matching this description. I have an excel file with the information and I'm just not sure how to turn this into a searchable database like that. If there's an existing tool, I'd happily use that, but if I need to learn some programming, I'll do that too.

[fortnightlily]

I just found this via Google, but maybe something like this? www.knackhq.com/features/

[ringstrue]

Don't use fucking Java!!!!!   Sorry I have issues, obvi. 


I say do JQuery AJAX PHP MySQL