LiveCode Server - where to start?

[Graham Samuel]

Hi

Although my experience of LiveCode scripting and the production of standalones is pretty extensive, I have never used any manifestation of LiveCode Server, but now I want to back a web site with in effect some LiveCode functionality and to communicate with users of the site (for example respond to a form a user may have filled in by emailing the user with derived data, while somehow retaining the info the user put into the form - I am hoping against hope that this doesn’t mean using a database as I don’t know anything about those either). 

The learning problem seems to me that this is a moving target in that quite big changes have been made to this incarnation of LiveCode over the years. Looking at the LC web site, the variety of dates of the tutorial info about this is quite worrying - there doesn’t seem to me to be a modern (i.e less than a year old) tutorial about how to set up a server that runs LC stacks, plus an explanation of what can and can’t be done after the install has happened. Also I sense that On-Rev (I have access) is the simplest way of doing this as a lot of stuff is pre-installed, but if I have server space elsewhere (I do) what I have to do to get a robust implementation?

You can probably tell from the above that I don’t even know the correct jargon to use when talking about these issues.

Can anyone point me at a tutorial or any other method of getting familiar with this stuff, as I really need it?

TIA

Graham