• The server is running Linux Fedora (also see Mandrake and Suse) at the moment. However, this is only my personal preference, all of the software will run on pretty much any OS on the planet.
• Web server is the Apache Http Server. Surprise, surprise, it is the most popular web server on the planet, after all. And free.
• Database is MySQL. I've been quite impressed, it does an excellent job. And it's free :-). I'm using 4.1.1, primarily for the INNODB ability to support referential integrity and ability to perform subselects. I am running an alpha version, to get some of the latest features... we're run into a few snags with it, but on the whole it's pretty solid. However, you could probably get the ddl I use to create/populate the database to work on almost any other database server, with a small amount of effort.
• Dynamic pages are served with a PHP module in Apache. I chose this for 2 reasons: I've never used PHP before, and it's a reasonably small/lightweight/low effort way to serve pages.

So, here's the current design in a nutshell. There are a few php pages, one each for the basic types of searches. They speak directly to the database (poor design, but I don't know a better way using PHP...do you?), and execute 0...n browser supplied sql queries. The php page generates XML from the result set(s), and (optionally) specifies an XSL Transform document to be applied (which the browser does). The browser gets the xml, sees which xslt is specified, which it then retrieves. It applies the XSLT to the XML to get HTML, which has a javascript sql creator for the search piece - so that the browser can generate the sql for the next search.

Currently, I'd like to get some people to "peer review" the design and implementation. Suggestions for new tables/additions to tables is good, but it's most important to make sure that I didn't miss anything key, that will make for difficult modifications later. Also need somebody good with html guis to make the xsl transforms (in this case, it looks very much like html... it's very easy to pick up given an example), somebody to work on the search section (to add more options), and somebody to start working on the UI for inserting/updating data.

• DDL script here. In mysql, load it with "mysql -p < retro.ddl" (the -p assumes you need to enter a password to connect).
• XSLT here
• PHP (forgive my complete and utter lack of naming standards)
  • index.php
  • common.php
  • save_suggestion.php
  • log_me_in.php
  • query_eq_include.php
  • query_footer_include.php
  • query_include.php
  • queryeq.php
  • queryowner.php
  • myeq.php
  • updatearea.php
  • updatearea_ex.php
  • updateeq.php
  • updateeq_ex.php
  • updateowner.php
  • updateowner_ex.php
  • delete_item.php
  • query_eq_simple.php