如何在本地使用PHP与SQL Server

Question

I am a desktop application / database programmer customizing an ERP application in a Windows environment. I have also done documentation with HTML and javascript on our intranet. I have not done any web programming.

I need to convert an Access 2003 application. Instead of using .Net I think it would be wiser to use HTML to allow access from a tablet. This app will display drawings based on certain lookup values (i.e. part number) stored in a SQL server database. After some research it seems PHP is the best choice. But the things I have found explain on a server supplying the pages and not running locally. I see Apache and IIS mentioned but are these needed if the pages will be loaded on a single machine (or multiple machines but all pages will be present in a single directory structure).

When I search for running pages locally I get pages accessing a databse locally. But the database will be on a server.

Can someone steer me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Since you don't want the presented data to be web-accessible (or at least not public), but you do want the presentation to be through HTML-pages, I can come up with two ideas:

1. Use a scripting language to access MS SQL Server, extract the data, and present it as HTML. Since you like PHP, maybe Perl with a suitable DB-access library might be a good idea.
2. PHP as you suggest, some kind of web-server, and a rigorous lock-down configuration so that the webserver is only accessible locally. Depending on the sensitivity of your data, this might be the worse option.