A Database with Netfirms.com

[HellblazerX]

Wow, it's been so long since I posted here, but since I chose to go down the Science path as opposed to a Computer Science degree, I haven't had much time to come back to this site. Anyways, here's my problem. My girlfriend is the president of our school's tutoring club, and as a way of connecting our clients to our students, we use a website that our clients can use to view our students' profiles, which they can edit themselves. The previous website was a complete mess to use, so this year we decided to overhaul it. Since we didn't really have anyone in the club that could do this, we hired someone else to do it (this person was cousin to a friend). Suffice to say, he did a very poor job with it.

Basically we wanted each student to have their own profile that only they could access in a database, and clients without access would simply view the profiles. However, our database designer decided that we only needed one account with one password, with access to all student profiles. Basically every student would login with the same username and password, and then type in their university student number to access their accounts. However, this isn't particularly secure, as our student numbers aren't very secure (it's displayed on our student cards, and is displayed on the school directory). While I don't think anyone in the club is malicious enough to hack into another student's account and change their profiles, I still think our members would prefer to have their own accounts that only they can access. However, the person we hired doesn't want to change it anymore (because we paid him already), so I figured I'd try to tackle this on, given if it isn't that difficult of job.

So here are my questions:

I'm decently rehearsed in Java, so is there any similarities between Java and MySQL (which he developed the database in), and if so, how easily could I pick up the language?

Secondly, has anyone else actually done a database using the hosting site Netfirms? The person we hired claims that he can't implement the system we want because of limitations on Netfirms's side. Is this true?

Finally, if anyone's done something like this, could you give me some pointers, or just point me in the right direction?

Thanks, and hey to all the members (both old and new )

EDIT: Oh, by the way, I don't need to implement anything like a registration protocol in, as the executive team would only be able to add in new members. It's ok if that process is a bit messy.

[Tony]

The typical design is that there is just one database user, but the only one who holds those credentials is the application running on the server. That application implements a layer of access control.

Users are never supposed to talk directly to the database.

[HellblazerX]

Ahhhh ok, so basically our guy got lazy and rather than programming a system of access just gave us the access codes. Well I hope he doesn't decide to use us as a reference in the future then .