How it works
Regardless of the database structure behind it, the way a Web page is integrated with a database remains essentially the same.
It follows a procedure similar to this:
- The client's Web browser requests a page.
- The Web server serves a page that contains embedded scripts requesting information from the database.
- A scripting language interpreter, or an application server, turns these requests into database queries.
- The application server queries the database--or several databases--and the database returns the results.
- The results are returned to the Web server, which passes them back to the client's Web browser.
However, the structure of the back-end systems, and the choice of languages used to make the queries, is extremely varied.
The three most common structures are:
- An all-in-one package, such as FileMaker, which allows databases to be published to the Web and acts as a Web server, application server and database.
- Using a Web server with an integrated scripting language--such as using ASP to run Visual Basic scripts in Microsoft IIS Web server, or using Perl or PHP with Apache Web server--which queries a separate database such as MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server.
- A Web server runs scripts to query an application server-that as BEA's WebLogic, IBM's Websphere, or Oracle's 9i application server--which generates a query or list of queries for the database or several databases. This is most frequently done using Java and can involve the use of Enterprise Java Beans.
Which structure or language you choose depends on a variety of factors such as the purpose of the database, the skills your staff have (or have access to), the structure of your existing data and of course your budget.
Keeping it simple
Keeping the structure simple does not mean the database will be simple or inflexible, argues FileMaker's McManus. "If you want to change something on the fly, a field label or the definition of a field, you can do that. With a lot of the competing products, it's like 'you should have really thought about that when you speced out your database, because now you're going to have to start from scratch'."
"When you think about the rate of change in the environment that we're in today, people don't even work in fixed geographies any more--you're in workgroups that come and go, you have people from mixed functional backgrounds, exchanging different types of data. When you've got all those things, you have to have something that's very flexible, robust, and solid."
