Help with money counter

[bboyson]

Hello,
I'm new to the programing world and i am trying to make a money counter for a charity group that will count how much money people donate and will update automatically when someone donates via pay pal or credit card. Can someone please walk me through this or post a link to a tutorial.

[larztheloser]

Can't do this in Javascript. Basically you'd get a server side script which stores the amount of people's payments on the server somewhere. PHP would be ideal.

[bboyson]

Thank you, do you happen to no a good site with a tutorial on how to do this.

[acoder]

Which language are you using on the server?

There is one part where you can use JavaScript if you want: if you want to keep a counter on the page that does not require a reload. However, this would still require the server-side script for the actual count.

[bboyson]

i use godaddys windows server to host my websites so i dont really use server lanugage but i would probably use php to make this counter instead of asp

[larztheloser]

Well, there is a PHP forum for just this kind of thing!

As for the javascript, it is as simple as this AJAX script:

function getMoneyCount(url)
{
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
  {
  xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
else
  {
  xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
xmlhttp.open("GET",url,false);
xmlhttp.send(null);
//put your layer on the line below
document.getElementById('moneyCounter').innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
}
getMoneyCount("mc.txt"); //put your PHP output file here

My script assumes the file has only one number in it - which it might not depending on which PHP script you use. Let us know if you need any more help!

[bboyson]

Thanks that really helped

[acoder]

Just two quick points:
1. Line 10 can have true as the last parameter:

xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);

to avoid freezing the browser while waiting for a response, i.e. an asynchronous request rather than a synchronous one.
2. Sometimes GET requests are cached. To avoid caching, set the appropriate headers or make sure it's a unique URL by appending the date string.