Whatever the size or the purpose of your Internet venture, gathering information from users and integrating that feedback with your back-end systems has always been a hassle. You want to post easy-to-use fill-in forms on your site, and you want to tabulate user responses quickly and easily. All of these tasks require databases, and databases aren't that easy to deploy.
The problem with handling database tasks on the Web is building the interaction. A database by itself isn't worth very much; what makes it valuable is the two-way information stream it provides. First, you and your users can make queries against the data in order to yield meaningful results. Second, users (with the proper permissions) can add to the database by creating and editing records or by filling in forms. In both cases, creating the Web interface for the database requires programming, or at least a Web editor that will perform the programming for you.
HTML forms are a good example. Although they have always been simple enough to design, making them do anything useful required programming, which typically meant using Perl to create CGI programs in the Web document that would accept and return data. And making the CGI program interact with your database application required more extensive programming.
In the past couple of years, the need for programming has been reduced to a degree by HTML editing programs (such as Microsoft FrontPage) and other packages designed to make form creation easier, but form programming remains a difficult part of Web design. Even if you use FrontPage, you enjoy full database integration only through Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 systems running Microsoft Internet Information Services. If you're leasing space from a Web hosting service that's running, say, Linux servers, you'll probably have to do at least some programming for your database interactions anyway.
None of this is a problem, of course, if you have the money and time for specialists to design your forms. But if you have neither, or if you have no inclination to get into even rudimentary programming, your chances of being able to put up an HTML database application have been quite remote. Until now.
New Web services let you create online databases and forms. The three early entries into the Web database category are Activespace, Bitlocker, and FormSite.com. The sites offer free versions, and some have upgraded, for-pay versions as well. In all cases, trying the free service will give you a strong sense of whether you'll need the additional features of the pay version. We'll look here at some of the ways in which these services can help you and your business.
