Chapter 10: Connections and Scripting

Overview

As much as the birth of web server scripting languages, web database connectivity has allowed static HTML to evolve into fully dynamic web applications. Dreamweaver MX is the ideal tool to develop a web application with web database connectivity. As you'll see in the following chapters, Dreamweaver MX can work with many web development languages set in a variety of environments. In addition, you've seen in the previous chapters that Dreamweaver MX can use web development languages to connect to almost any SQL-compliant database.The glue that binds a web application to a database is the database connection. However, there are an astounding number of database connections to choose from. In fact, the number of possible database connections far outweighs the number of web scripting languages and databases combined. With that many choices, how do you choose the right database connection for your web application? Luckily, your choice of a web development language and an accompanying database will narrow the playing field.

That said, this chapter focuses on the various types of database connections available to you per your scripting language choice. As you'll see, some database connections are common across all Dreamweaver MX supported web development languages. We'll begin with an introduction to how Dreamweaver MX handles database connections in a web application and define the connection types. Then we'll move on to creating database connections for each supported web development language.