I have built out a cakephp application that is hosted on AWS and am now looking to build a force.com app that connects to the same database and provides some of the (relevant) functionality to clients who have a salesforce account.

This will be my first project in force.com and I'm not sure exactly where to start. Should I just use the IDE, and if I do that can I build an app using an existing mysql database not hosted at force.com?

I have a booking sheet that is dynamically built using XML. The page is basicaly a form with lots of checkboxes.

How can I set the name attribute of the checkboxes, and then howe do I read in the values in the controller extenstion class.

What I would like is for the page to have something structured liek this

<input type="checkbox" value="1" id="BookingSheetCheck881" name="data[BookingSheet][check][881]">

<input type="checkbox" value="1" id="BookingSheetCheck882" name="data[BookingSheet][check][882]">

<input type="checkbox" value="1" id="BookingSheetCheck883" name="data[BookingSheet][check][883]">

Then somehow loop through the resulting $_POST params which would be structured as a nested array, something like:

$_POST[ 'BookingSheet' ][ 'check' ][ '881' ]

$_POST[ 'BookingSheet' ][ 'check' ][ '882' ]

$_POST[ 'BookingSheet' ][ 'check' ][ '883' ]

I have built out a cakephp application that is hosted on AWS and am now looking to build a force.com app that connects to the same database and provides some of the (relevant) functionality to clients who have a salesforce account.

This will be my first project in force.com and I'm not sure exactly where to start. Should I just use the IDE, and if I do that can I build an app using an existing mysql database not hosted at force.com?