Databases and Searches in HTML Creating Commercial Websites

Databases and Searches in HTML Creating Commercial Websites, Computers make it possible for you to organize huge amounts of data and recall that data quickly.

When information is contained within databases, you can easily search, update, change, generate specialized reports, and in general push, prod, or pull information from the system in any way you desire.

When you give WWW viewers the ability to search your databases, you are giving them a wealth of information.

You can easily separate the issue of databases and the Web into two distinct categories: from your database and onto the Web (presenting information contained within a database on the Web, a very complex project) and from the Web and onto your database (importing data from forms into a database, which is not so complex).

From Your Database and onto the Web

 

The use of databases with the Web is a new and complex issue; things seem to be changing on a daily basis in terms of the products available and the uses for those products.

A few uses for databases on the Web:

  • Using the Internet for sales leads via an HTML form that is automatically entered into a “sales leads” database.
  • Creating customized Web sites (often call dynamic Web sites) that create HTML pages based on the viewers’ specifications.
  • Providing “shopping cart” systems (online “stores” that enable the users to place items they wish to purchase in a virtual shopping cart until they are ready to “check out”)
  • Putting your up-to-date product information online

Putting Your Product Information Online

 

When putting your product information online, you need to consider two points. First, your customers should be able to easily browse through or search for a product

(and to have the product information up-to-date); and second, they need to be able to order that product online simply. (Payment issues are discussed in Chapter 16, “Taking Payment Online.”)

The most challenging part will be keeping your information up-to-date.

You could easily put your catalog online in HTML format within an easy-to-navigate Web site and accomplish this if you have a small inventory

(see “Keeping It Simple,” later in this chapter),

but if you provide tons of different products or if your product information (such as pricing) changes often,

keeping all this information up-to-date can soon turn into a time-consuming job. The solution? Providing this information in a database! Hopefully,

you are already using a database for keeping this information up-to-date, and if so, the solution is simply (or not so simply) a matter of connecting that database to the Web. This keeps the information all in one place,

while allowing different ways to access and view it.

So,

how do you hook up your database to the Web? Well, you’ll need a program that queries the database and returns an HTML-formatted result. This is called a dynamic site. It offers ease of maintenance and administration for a large database system,

and even enables dynamic, data-driven Web sites that use HTML documents which are generated on the fly (from information stored in databases and provided by users).

Page content can be instantly customized based on user requests.

All this requires either a lot of programming skill,

or time learning a new commercial program designed for this purpose. It also requires that your information be in a certain database format or that you transpose all your product information into an acceptable format

(what that acceptable format is depends on the program used to access it).

This also requires certain things from your server that you may or may not have available. In most cases, you will need your own server in order to do this.

The programming involved in setting up and connecting a database to the Web is far too complex a subject to describe here,

but we would like to give you a quick overview of some of the commercially available products for this purpose:

  • Cold Fusion ™ Professional 1.5
  • Sapphire/Web 2.0
  • NetDynamics 1.0 beta

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *