I have encountered this problem before, and tackeled it with a number of different solutions. One of which (used coldfusion <-- yuck! and oracle) for a conference room booking system, the others used php and perl with postgres.

From my experience the examples out there are scarce and poor...but WCAL is a calendar system which may give you some insight into the logic behind this type of project.

A few tips from the experienced:

If at all possible use SQL! Whether it be mysql, postgres, oracle, miniSql, or even god forbid SqlServer. Using SQL will speed up you app (probably) and will positivly make the creation process much easier (if you know your basic SQL commands, select, insert, update, and delete)

For the "duration" portion of the app, use something like:



StartTimeStamp        06/19/2001 04:30:00
EndTimeStamp          06/19/2001 06:00:00
Duration(in minutes)  90
[download]


and a final tip is for the timestamps use the actual unix timestamp, and then manipulate that with Date::Calcand Date::Manip

Other than that dive in and go for it ... it truly wont be as bad as you might think.

HTH

- foogod

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.