Carte-Blanche on Web server design - what would you do?

[Fat Tone]

I regularly place questionnaires on web pages for Psychology research (some of you will have seen some of them). Usually the users tick a few boxes, or presses a few keys, and then clicks on submit, or I use javascript to validate the page & submit.

The submit action calls a cgi which sends me an email formatted prety much how I wish, but that is all I can get the computer centre to do. They won't write any new scripts unless they are widely useful and won't let me provide my own.

What I want is a system that can generate unique anonymous IDs for users, particularly useful for longitudinal surveys, but may also help detect multiple submissions. For this I think I need my own server.

So they questions are these:

1) What spec/design of server would you use (the usage will be low, but it needs to be reliable).
2) What OS would you use (our network is centrally administered Win2k)
3) What form of scripting would you use to handle form submissions etc?

TIA

Tony.

[GNEP]

Depends on (a) money and (b) what you like scripting in.

Personally, because I know it better, I would go for Win2k/IIS/ASP

[thop]

the classic LAMP. Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl/Python. no need for mysql here though.
best of all it's free.

[Fat Tone]

Money won't be a problem. All (or most) MS s/w is available virually free on the Campus agreement. I'm totally new to server side scripting. I do have Macromedia Studio MX available if that helps.

Cheers

T.

[omegaRED]

My vote goes to PHP/MySQL as well. Works pretty well on a win2k IIS5 too...

Oh and... DW MX will be a great asset in the beginning, as long as you dont want to do anything 'radical' ... Then, you`ll just use it for the layout and recordsets/updates/inserts, and once you get those working, you`ll end up coding (that happened in my case ) And its fun

BTW, i can recommend Sam`s Teach Yourself PHP in 24 hrs book. GREAT read, well written, lots of examples and PRACTICAL use (e.g. functions you`ll use almost everyday, creating your own functions etc.)

And ofcourse, the PHP4 manual in .chm format