Greetings all.
Im not sure what Im asking for, but I'll try and be as direct as possible.
Im a lonesome software programmer who only uses Visual Basic 6, and one of new projects in development, will integrate alongside with a forum on my webserver.
By Integreate I mean the program talks with my IP connection on a dedicated port (ie. not 80) that handles the communication between client's running my program and a database. This database, is what I also want to share with the forum on my webserver.
My biggest problem is that I haven't a clue (nor do I have the time or want to) to use JAVA/PHP/etc to code up my forum, and I don't want to use a free/commercial forum package either because of the integration issues, plus other things.
What I really desire to do is code my own forum in Visual Basic that will run on my webserver.
My problem lies here. I don't know how to get going with designing the forum and getting a webserver running it on my 24/7 ADSL connection. I know a little about the HTTP protocol and have sucessfully created & tested my own webserver which handles, yup, basic HTTP GET functions, however Im okay
to use a third party webserver if its necessary.
I've examined many existing forums, and they send a "POST" request through a FORM on the HTML page to the webserver which forwards it to usually a PHP file. Im not sure what happens there after, but from noticing this, this is where lightbulbs starting glowing above my head.
How do I go about forwarding POST requests to a Visual Basic DLL and more importantly, how do I handle the posts and relay data back to the client (obviously as HTML), but whats the send/receive mechanics within the DLL that I use on my webserver's coding. Seeming DLL's consist of Function's,How do you pass to a function or is there something Im completely missing here???!
Can someone give me any light on what Im on about (ie. Is this ActiveX). If Im headed in the right direction here, does anyone have or know of where to find more information or a framework for this DLL bizzo?
Your time to help me out is kindly appreciated.
Cheers,
Tim
Schitzn
www.schitzn.cjb.net
