Help with online high scores

Question

I'm working on a marathon runner game ( http://www.locopuyo.com/MarathonRunnerBeta1.zip ) just for the fun of it. What I am wondering is what the best way to make a high scores list would be.
I have mySQL on my server, I don't know if that is the best way to do it though.
I don't know at all how to connect files on the internet with java.
I was thinking it might be easier if I just had a plain html web site that I could edit in my java program using ftp, but I don't know how to do that and dont' even know if it is possible.
Any help would be much appretiated.

Answer 1

since you have MySQL on your server, I'm going to go ahead and assume you have PHP installed also. If so, you can do the highscore work in PHP and just have the game query that script. Basically (if you know anything about PHP and web queries in general) you just query the URL of the PHP script with a few GETVARS. In the simplest (and most easily hacked) way is something like:
http://yourserver.com/game/highscore.php?action=submit&name=bob&score=5000highscore.php (your script) would then use MySQL to store the data of the GETVARS ($action,$name, and $score).
All you need in Java to query this script is the URL class.
URL url = new URL("http://yourserver.com/game/highscore.php?action=submit&name=bob&score=5000");
url.openConnection(); // this is where it is queriedhighscore.php is where you need to do your database work. If you don't know anything about PHP or if this sounds too easily hacked, you might look into connecting to MySQL via JDBC (see tutorial)
If I find the time I can make a simple template for you to build off of