Need ideas for where to start on RateMyProfessors-type site

Question

I'm trying to create a website that accepts submissions into a form, and then later on I can display it in tables organized by categories, similar to how RateMyProfessors does it:

http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/SelectTeacher.jsp?sid=399

To me, my main concerns are:

1. Figuring out a good way to read in submissions and save it into a database in the backend,

and

1. Displaying the data in organized tables on the frontend.

I know HTML, have worked with Google Web Toolkit a fair bit, and a little bit of MySQL. However, I don't know anything about PHP and only a little bit of Javascript. Any suggestions of what I should use?

Answer 1

There are most likely several ways to accomplish the task. The most common would be to use PHP and MySQL on the server side. You probably don't need any client side code. I whipped out my PHP/MySQL driven site similar to what you want to do after reading 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' by Luke Welling and Laura Thompson. It's a 900+ page book, but I moved through it pretty quickly. If you've code C or Java, PHP is not a lot different.