How would I create this?!

[j0hnb]

Me and some friends had a concept that we are trying to set up but I have no clue how to do it. We wanted to set up a world map, and have each country have a small transparent type of comment box over it. This box would have dynamic text of a name and a #. We wanted to set up a system where you could type in a user name, and select a country and it would add you name and a number to that country's box. The number would be the # of times that name has been submitted for that country. I figure it owuld need to be PHP or CGI so that it will automatically generate its self everytime an new entry is added. How would I go about doing this??? Any help would be great, thanks.

[spufi]

Any server side language should work, and you might also want to use a database for it even though the database would be really small in terms of fields and whatnot.

[j0hnb]

the whole server side thing i'm not very good with, could you give me a few specifics? Thanks.

-John

[PeOfEo]

ASP.NET ASP CGI JSP PHP CF. You will need a data base to store the information. My personal pick would be asp.net but that is because I know vb and asp.net is one of the only two oo web programming languages/technologies out there (I did not include perl since I have heard arguments both ways and have never seen a perl class).

[spufi]

Wouldn't a list of names get rather long for a country and hence wouldn't the list cover up the country at some point? I can see having a list of countries and each one having a sub list of names with the number of times each name has been submitted, but putting that info on a map doesn't seem like it would work.

What you could do is have a file, maybe multiple files, that stores what country a person picks and thier name. When you go through and display the names and the number of times each name has been selected, you can seach through your files and calculate the number of times a name appears for a particular country. Again, using a database would most likely simplifiy this part.

[PeOfEo]

You could just store all of it in mssql or mysql or even access though access does not function as well when there is a lot of data. Just use a auto number or incrementing feild as the primary key for the data base or identity feild. That way there can be no true duplicate entries.