What is the best language for a form?

User input and email results to me

[youfoundjake]

I need to create a form.

It's a layered form.
3 radio buttons (google, yahoo, msn)

If google is selected, give these 10 options (drop down box maybe?)
then fill in the required fields based on selection from drop down, each selection displays a different set of fields.
Once that is all filled out, email the form to me, unless its msn, then email it to that person over there, or if its yahoo, send the email the them upstairs.

Am I wanting AJAX?
.ASP?
PHP?

any recommandations?
Some helpful links if you suggest a particular way?

[encyclo]

For something as simple as an email script, the main factors dictating your choice will be:

1. The languages available on your server (ASP on Windows, PHP or Perl on Linux), and
2. The language you or your developer knows best.

Ajax can be a useful addition in terms of usability (show/hide portions of the form), but it should still be functional without it.

[JAB Creations]

You're wanting to learn the basics first and then slowly adding to the complexity you want to achieve.

For your long range goal however after reading ASP.NET and working with PHP for a while I would highly recommend PHP if you want cleaner code by default (ASP.NET from what I've been reading does clientside code for you and it's about as pretty as Myspace's (insert anything here).

But serverside code isn't the real issue here. Do you even know what AJAX is used for?

Create an (X)HTML form to start with and post it here. You'll eventually want to work with JavaScript. Serverside languages (PHP, ASP.NET, etc) aren't necessary from what I'm perceiving you want to do.

- John

[youfoundjake]

I am running IIS on my box, developer? heeh? whats that? oh wait thats me!
I know enough about everything to waddle through it, having come up with some ugly hacks to make things work, I mean BIG giant puzzles of pieces and trimming corners to fit properly :)

So Ajax functionality on ASP eh?
Okie dokie. I'll start looking into it.

[Dabrowski]

I've not used Ajax before, but I would use a tiny little bit of JS to toggle show/hide on the form.

As for emailing the form, I run my own servers and always use Perl for back-end. I believe there is quite a well known module called formmail.pl which does exactly what you're after. If you want something a little more fancy try Mail::Sender, that way you can parse the form data how you like and format your own email.

[youfoundjake]

Yeah, I've been looking around, and thinking that its going to be JS, or maybe css with divs, not sure yet.