I desire to create a very simplistic php based database. Instead of the data being written to mysql I want to save the data from a form to a remote file. How can I do this and how can I view the data?
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.remote-files.php
I really would recommend using one of the existing database engines, even if your application will only be something very simple (in which case you could take a look at sqlite), since searchability and other basic SQL functionality will be a real problem to implement in PHP.