Audience

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In general, this book should be of value to anyone who wants to build a Web site, or to make an existing site more interactive, more responsive to visitors in terms of adapting to what they re looking for, and always up to date by drawing on the information currently in a database. This includes individuals, low-budget organizations, businesses both small and large, and academic or government institutions. More specifically, here are a few of the types of people or groups who can use the material presented in this book:

• Database and Web site developers. This is the most obvious group of people who stand to benefit from the book. If you re a member of this group, you already may be building the kind of applications we deal with here, but are looking for additional ideas and techniques.

• Businesses. Many business people seem to believe they are under the mandate we have to get our business on the Internet, and that it s no longer possible to survive just as a BAM (brick-and-mortar) organization. (I don t know whether this is true, so I won t try to convince you that a Web presence is an absolute necessity for your business. If you re already motivated to go online, however, this book will help you do it.) We ll cover topics such as product registration, online catalog presentation, and e-commerce.You may not need to go online, but you certainly can use the Web to provide better service to your customers and to your own staff.

• Managers. You may not know or care about writing programs, but you can use this book to see what kinds of applications can be built and what they can be used for. This can help you focus or articulate your organization s Web strategy and better understand the possibilities for what you can accomplish with your site. (It also can give you some background for communicating with your software developers, who seem to live in a different world and speak a different language than you do!)

• People who want to share information with others. If you re tired of exchanging email attachments, you can use the Web to help you collaborate. For example, a group of researchers can construct a repository of shared data that they upload through a Web site and store in a database.

• People who want to build a personal Web site. Some people want to build Web-based tools for no better reason than to help them get their own work done more effectively. And that s a perfectly good reason! There s no rule that you have to build a site for use by someone else (such as when a business orients its site toward use by customers). You can target it for your own purposes, often with relatively simple applications. For example, a basic note-taking application is a natural candidate as a Web-based application that uses a database for storing information. By making this information available on the Web, you can access it from anywhere that a browser is available a client s office, in a hotel room or conference center, and so on. You don t have to be sitting in front of your microcomputer or workstation. And if you want to share the information with others, you can.

The preceding examples illustrate some of the what you can do capabilities that result from combining Apache, MySQL, and Perl. There are also certain economic motivations for using this suite of tools:

• The software is freely available, so you can get it with little or no investment.

• You may need to build a site on a shoestring budget. Perhaps you are helping to set up a site for a nonprofit organization that has little in the way of financial resources.

• Some people are just philosophically opposed to using software from large corporations that costs lots of money and is subject to restrictive licensing conditions. (I won t pursue that issue here except to note that for the vast majority of the tools we ll use in this book, you can get them for nothing whenever you want, and you can use them however you please without asking anyone.)

The desire to save money isn t restricted to those with little of it. You may, in fact, be a representative of a large commercial organization, reading this book with the goal in mind of assessing whether it can help your business cut costs without sacrificing performance. I believe it can, but I also recognize that businesses are often deeply ambivalent about free software and have questions about its legitimacy. Like everyone else, they are attracted by the notion of inexpensive tools, but at the same time, suspicious of the term free. And not without reason, because a lot of free software is junk.

That s not the case with the tools we re using. Freely available can mean free (no cost), but it doesn t mean worthless (no value). It doesn t mean unprofessional or unreliable, either. MySQL, Perl, and Apache are well written and they work. Just because the software is available to anyone, even people or organizations with very limited budgets, doesn t mean it has no value for you.

Nevertheless, if you re running software provided by corporate giants such as Oracle or Microsoft, the thought of switching to software provided by Open Source project teams may give you pause. Let s face it, if you run a business and don t perform some kind of preliminary analysis to assess the wisdom of such a move, you re being reckless. Part of your analysis should be to try the software. All this discussion about the value of free software can be taken as propaganda from an author who wants to sell you a book, but you don t need to take my word for it. Anyone can try the software, so put it to the test and see for yourself. If you like it, arrange for support.

Obviously, if you re running a business, you re going to have more stringent requirements than, say, a hobbyist who is running a Web site in the basement on a bargain-bin computer connected to the Internet by something like a cable modem or DSL line. That kind of user probably isn t going to require 247 uptime. If the machine blows a disk or memory goes bad, it will just be down until the owner gets around to swapping in a replacement part. (Not to mention that cable and DSL providers rarely make any particular connectivity guarantees for residential service, anyway.)

If you re a business depending on providing continuous access to your Web site for your customers and sales staff, you are going to be concerned about redundant backbone links, backup servers, and support staff. You d be foolish not to, and you re prepared to make the investment necessary to ensure you get the performance you need.

It s the same way with your software. Most people rely on informal support. MySQL and DBI, for example, have active and helpful user communities available through their mailing lists. Businesses can use the lists, too, but many go further. The software may be free, but professional help is available to help you use it. (This is the point at which free software stops being free!) You can get paid support for MySQL. The MySQL developers are happy to set up formal support agreements. Consultants also are available to help you set up your installation and keep it running.

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