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How do database driven blog-style websites work? [closed]

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Before I start: I know this is a very broad question, but it is the best way I could phrase it, I have searched around a lot and can only seem to find generic explanations. I searched SO and didn't find much. I have also skimmed through some pages in the wordpress codex, and didn't find anything really useful.
I would like to create a simple database driven blog-style website, it will really only consist of stories (their title, date, content, etc), I just began teaching myself web development and my idea of how database driven websites work has proven to be completely wrong. I figured you would always need a file connecting to the database for each article, but the more I read I learn about mark up being generated on request, and so on, so the actual /year/month/day/article doesn't actually have to exist on the server, or that may be wrong, that is why I am here.
As I said I cannot find much on this topic that isn't a generic graphic of a server interacting with a web page. How does one go about creating a database driven website of this style? Are the files/directories not actually on the server but only created on a case by case basis as someone requests it? If so, then why can you type out a complete url and it be there with out throwing a 404? I have a lot of questions, really all I need is a strong explanation of how these sites work, code examples, and so on. Could someone explain how they work or point me to information (recommended articles, examples or books)?
EDIT: Please don't recommend a framework, I want to understand how these sites work and build one myself.

It's actually quite simple. Wordpress's index page calls wp-blog-header.php. That file calls for other files, and those files call for other files. It goes on for some time until all the contents of the page are actually loaded.
The databases come in when you start thinking about having users. Obviously the user information is stored in the database. Beyond that, Wordpress keeps post titles, dates, and other information in the database for easy loading later on.
Comments are also stored in the database. Each comment is associated with a number, and in the database, just like the posts, the dates/times as well as the usernames associated with the comments are kept.
Further exploration in the actual Wordpress files will reveal a lot of interesting features.

You might want to check out Django. It is an open source Python web framework that provides a lot of the functionality you are talking about. It also has a lot of very good high-level documentation with even a free e-book. It is centered a bit more on newspaper type sites than blogging, but most of the same principles apply. If you are new to python and like to use IDEs I would recommend checking out PyCharm. It has tight Django integration and makes for simple project setup and debugging.

Generally speaking, you'll use a framework that will take input parameters (year/month/day/article), run some code to fetch data from the database, and dynamically create the webpage. There isn't an actual .html file sitting on the webserver. One of the most popular frameworks to do websites like you're describing is Ruby on Rails, which makes it incredibly simple to do.

Alternative to MS Access with Forms and Reporting Capabilities [closed]

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I have been looking on SO and can't seem to find something more recent than around 2008.
I am looking for an alternative to Microsoft Access with similar capabilities. I.e:
Forms
Macros
Reports
Etc
In another question VS Lightswitch was recommended (Still in Beta 2). I had a look at it, although it seems good it is still reasonably new and unsuported at this stage.
My main purpose is to have a DB that is simple, portable and can be accessed easily (mostly by 1 person at a time, but also sometimes by multiple people). I know Access can provide this and if it seems to be the best solution I might stick with it, but are there anything else out there that someone has found useful for custom data capture, filtering and creating reports?
I know that Visual Studio or alike can be used, but would prefer something more in line with Access.
The link to similar questions are (but seem to be somewhat old):
Front-End for MS Access migration?
Replacing MS Access forms
Alternatives to Access
Good Free Alternative To MS Access

People are usually looking for Alternative to MS Access either because:
They, for some reasons, consider
that Microsoft is Evil
They don't want to pay for the extra Access licensing
For people from Group 1,I do not have that much to say. I was part of it till I realised how fast and simple it was to use some of these great software (not all ...) sold for a very fair price. Up to now, I have spared years of headache using them. Thanks Microsoft, I owe you one.
For people from group 2, there is a runtime\free version of Access that you can deploy (for free, I insist) on your final user's computers. It means that you do not have to buy any basic office software for your users but you still can have your users running an Access App on their machines ...

Try OpenOffice.org. It has the Base program, which is similar to Access. It is also free and open source.

One of the reasons people are looking for this is because Access 2013 is quite different than previous versions and it looks like it will soon be the end of the road for this product. The problem with Kexi and Base as well as the other office clone versions is that they are very weak in their support for scripting. With MS VBA many things can be accomplished which are not available in these (as yet).
Access has a built in IDE for developing VBA and it is almost the full visual basic 6 IDE with nice a debugger etc. The only product I have found thus far which have something like this usually have a much higher price tag than access. (Alpha 5)

You can Consider Kaxi ( http://kexi-project.org/ ) , as it a database component of KDE-office.

MS SQL and my need for a little direction [closed]

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I've been lurking around for several weeks and have been totally blown away by the amount of information and how the community quickly responds. I have noticed that questions like this typically receive sarcastic remarks and sometimes get down voted. Please bear with me as I attempt my first post :)
I little background..
I work at a tiny software company as the "QA department". Our application has a MS SQL back to store customer data and short term loan information for financial service companies. I started working here 6 years ago as a gernal technician to provide support for their call center, so I've been overly exposed to SQL and have become fairly familiar with working with it. You probably wouldn't pay me to develop a enterprise level database, but at this point I've become familiar enough to do most things in SQL.
Why I'm asking my question..
I want to develop an application to store and track our software issues and new dev. I've done research on this website along with asking around and I still feel sort of lost as to which direction I should take. I want the core of the application to be pretty basic at first, to provide various screens between my entities/modules and to create reports to show their various relationships. In the future I want it to be more complex, to provide a web portal of some sort and to start getting into various complex QA software concepts. I've read around and it sounds like I might want some variation of C/VB for the windows portion, but all of the topics have sort of overwhelmed me. Do I want to start with a more basic one that was created 20 or 30 years ago? (I think that's C and C++, right?) or a more recent one like C#? Will I be able to develop a web portal with both of these? (by web portal I'm thinking it would provide access to our database of defects and have username/password sign-in). I've seen that the various .NET languages lean more towards web development, should I start with one of these?
I am at the very beginning of this and I fully understand that I'm jumping into some deep waters here. I want to make sure I don't end up spinning my wheels and that I focus my energy on something that won't end up being a bad idea in 1 or 2 years after I start. So far I've found this website very helpful, if I can pick a direction I know I won't have any problems finding what the next step is. It might help to know that I have no formal or informal programming background (if it wasn't obvious). I'm a 27yo techie who is starting his first venture into programming, go easy on me! Thanks for taking the time to read this :)

I won't recommend that you go to C, C++, or VB. C and C++ are used mainly for developement of system software, compilers, etc. VB is deprecated by now; there is a .net version VB.NET, but my preference is C#.
Looks like you are a Microsoft shop. Steer youself towards using C#. Visual Studio provides great support for development of Web Applications with support for holding state in entities backed by MS SQL.
I would start with a simple example as given in MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd410597.aspx.
This example uses an Model View Controller based framework that is fairly easy to configure and use. They have great examples.
There is a free framework that also supports MS SQL Entity store http://www.coderun.com/ide/
Enjoy

Don't write a line of code. There are literally hundreds of open source and commercial software packages that already do what you want to do. You'd be better of spending time researching them and finding the package that most closely meets your requirements. A good solution will also be extensible enough that you'll be able to modify it to meet all of your requirements.
Since you work for a small company I can guarantee you that using your limited development hours "writing your own" will be counterproductive. You'd be better off adopting something off the shelf and becoming proficient at it. You'll learn more about developing systems like this once you've become intimately familiar with one of them.
Check out JIRA or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems for some other ideas.

For the benefit of your company I would recommend to use an existing
solution. But if you want to learn and build something of your own, I
would suggest that you check out some popular web application
frameworks, like:
Django
Ruby On Rails
Zend
Good Luck with your project!

Given that your intent is to learn and create something yourself I think you should consider a LAMP stack and PHP with one of the PHP frameworks on top (Cake PHP, code-igniter or the like).
The C++ route is a long hard way (C++ is my language of choice) to learn; as a learning experience I think you will get quicker and more satisfying results with PHP.
I also think that this is a realistic project for someone of your skills over a period of a 6 to 12 months - start with a simple requirement and then build it up to have all the features you need.
If you just want a bug tracking system obviously there are many options that won't demand any development.

How much experience do you have with things like installing Linux, Apache, Mysql, etc? If you are completely new to this, then this will be a much tougher task, because there are many layers you'll have to learn before you can even get to the point of writing an end-to-end application.
I would avoid C/C++/C# because there are a lot of things you would need to learn about basic programming before you even got to the stage where you could make database calls.
On the assumption that you don't have experience with LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/(Perl/Python/PHP)), my suggestion would be to start simply, by using a scripting language like Python or Perl. You can very easily get a database connection, and start writing queries, and extracting data from there. If you are used to Windows, I would install ActivePerl or ActivePython, and start from there. You can start building a command line program that does what you want, and then from there, you can move on to creating a web application that can do something similar.
Building a web application would likely be much easier than writing a Windows application, so after you have gotten comfortable with the scripting language, that's the direction I would go afterwards.
Good luck!

Which Silverlight Control Set is better? Telerik or ComponentArt? [closed]

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Which Silverlight Control Set is better? Telerik or ComponentArt?
I have used ComponentArt, but I just reviewed Telerik and it looks like they might have better functionality for the same price.
If you have used both, then please let me know your opinion.

ive been using Telerik controls for about 3 years. at this point i dont plan on doing any UI work without them...ever.
Support team is amazing
large dev community
tight integration with VS
releases are in step with MS releases
NO LICENSE REQUIRED ON INDVIDUAL MACHINES JUST THE DLLS
i have no idea what the gent who replied they are difficult to install/unistall from a project is talking about...honestly. in regards to "replacing a radpanel with something light weight takes a day" they are built on top of aspnet ajax and actually have more features and performance wise (in respect to xmlhttp panel) they are much faster. aspnet does full page cycle its not even ajax its just a trick to surpress the page blink. same traffic can be seen in fiddler with or without them. much less with telerik.
as far as SL controls go. they are without any doubt the best on the market

The best solution that I have found is to try out Telerik's controls yourself and you will be happy:) They offer a 60 day trial period that can even be extended and you can get support during the trial period.

I've inherited codebases infested with Telerik garbage in the past, and I would strongly recommend avoiding their stuff at all cost.
The one good thing I can say about them is that it only takes about a day of effort to remove their terrible Ajax RadPanel stuff and replace it with something lightweight and sane.
I've not tried their Silverlight stuff, but having seen the quality of their other products, I don't plan on doing so.

I used Telerik controls for AJAX in my projects in the last couple of years and so far I do not have any complaints. My productivity boosted to a great extent and my clients are very happy with the results.
Jason, I do not know why you consider the Telerik AJAX controls as a low quality toolset - the ajax panels are simply wrappers around the asp UpdatePanels with some thingies that helps you manage async requests. Furthermore, their ajax manager is quite handy when you want to define declarative ajax relations through the designer or initiate ajax requests from the client and intercept them on the server with simplified coding.
I am beginning to evaluate their Silverlight toolset as well for some of my future projects and at this point my impressions are rather positive than negative (compared to ComponentArt).
Dick

Useful Developer Resources in Second Life [closed]

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Second Life is fun to play with, and some developers are creating content there, but I was wondering what useful resources (if any) are available in Second Life for professional software developers.
Discussion groups
Education/training
Vendor support
Development-related presentations or demos
Professional contacts
To clarify: I'm not really looking for information on developing stuff for use in Second Life (although those answers are welcome). I am looking for pointers to stuff in SL that programmers would find useful for their real-life work.

They have a site about some of these uses: http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/api/
and some pages on the language they kind of grew: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal

Like you I find playing around with SL pretty interesting for recreational coding. One of the experiences that made me think there was something to it was trying to code a working clock in a sandbox (a general building area in SL). Other avatars would walk past and make suggestions and as there's a fair few coders around it soon turned into an interesting collaborative effort. If only it was that simple in RL. Some things just work really neatly in SL - I once implemented a swarming algorithm using a flock of 'birds' as the objects (which gives a whole new take on oops).
As to resources - assuming you're beyond basic coding level then you should be able to figure most things out from the LSL Wiki - http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal.
There's an ebook - "Scripting Recipes for Second Life" by Jeff Heaton which covers the basics in a reasonably well laid out way. It's only a few dollars but probably only worth it if you've not done a great deal of coding elsewhere. There's also regular classes held in-world, but I believe most of these are at a pretty basic level.
For groups I've always found the Scripters of Second Life group very helpful with a lot of people generally on it. There's one called simply Scripts which is quite active too.
A couple of words of warning, LSL, whilst Turing-complete is pretty broken in several areas, lacks modern program constructs (and some older ones - like arrays!) and much of the 'black-art' of LSL is knowing how to work around the limitations, With the advent of Mono though this is likely to be a decreasing issue.
Also there does seem to be an assumption by the Lindens that if you want to do any 'heavy-lifting' code you'll do it on a server off-world and call and return results to/from SL. This isn't helped by the XMP-RPC implementation being very broken, although HTTP works fine (and generally better than might be expected).

I vaguely remember Dr Dobbs running some sort of ongoing "Programmer's Island" thingy in SL, but I can't find the reference right now.
Apparently some sort of "virtual conference" for software developers.

As far I'm concerned, I'm trying to contribute to the OpenSim project which is a OpenSource clone of the SecondLife server infrastructure, written in C# and Mono.
OpenSim is SL like, enhanced with many additional script commands, open grid protocols, with customized modules and plugins. It definitely worth a look if you dont already heard about it.

ControlBreak suggested this in a comment (I'm promoting it to an answer):
You can visit Microsoft Island. Presentations of new products are done regularly - http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=663#more-663

IBM, Microsoft and Sun are pretty active in Second Life and sometimes there are interesting presentations/demos to see. Some of those are great for networking and meeting people from those companies which work on products you're interested in.
There are several groups for Java, PHP and several other programming languages apart from LSL, however IMO they're not as good resource as other non-SL resources. You can get your questions answered more quickly on StackOverflow or IRC.
IBM held several interesting programming competitions - there was something with robots finding a way out of the maze by IBM, there are also robot wars and some other programming competitions in SL, however they are all LSL-oriented.
I think I saw a beginner PHP class once, so if you're interested in learning programming language from start, try searching events and you might find something; however those are pretty rare in my experience.

Look & Feel team Scripting, it's mine. Common 3D trouble is confusing camera center between camera or actor. A designer may think camera center is world when it should be actor.