Introducing Dynamic Applications


Over the last decade, the amount of data being delivered via web applications has grown at a tremendous rate. Every day, the web delivers content ranging from product catalogs to children's sports league schedules to educational training and nearly everything in between. And as the need to manage vast amounts of information has grown, so have the options for storing and delivering it. Although today's web pages are based around the HTML language, they have been paired with additional languages such as the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), JavaScript, VBScript, Java, PHP, VB.NET, and C# to supplement what HTML can't do. Through their own syntax and functions, each of these languages provides additional calculation, data validation, and connectivity functionality.

Probably the most important aspect of any of these is the connectivity element. Each of these languages is capable of connecting to a wide variety of database management systems and communicating data requests, updates, edits, and deletions that enable you to leverage the powerful storage capabilities of databases and use them to provide data for your web applications.

Now, that was quite a mouthful, wasn't it? What this all boils down to is that by using a supplemental language, you can allow your web applications to talk to databases and extract data from them. In real terms, this means that you can build a 10-page web, and those 10 pages can serve the same purpose as 1,000 HTML pages could have.

Imagine your company has a product catalog that consists of 500 items. As the web developer, your boss just told you that he needs an online catalog built that showcases each of these products. With only HTML in your toolbox, you would have to develop a catalog site that had at least 501 pages. The first page would be an index of all the products, and the other 500 would be product details pages for each of the individual products. Just think about how long it would take to create 501 HTML pageseven leveraging the template functionality that Dreamweaver offers. If creating each page and adding content took you one hour, you'd be looking at 12 weeks of straight work just to create the pages and fill them with data. And then what happens when it's time to update the information? Ugh!

Now, what if I told you that you could provide exactly the same functionality with only two pages? Sounds much better, right? Just the savings in development time alone would make it worth the effort. And how about the opportunity cost savings of not having you tied up with the mundane task of generating HTML pages for the next three months? Those types of arguments are certainly going to grab your boss's attention. So what is this solution that I'm offering? Database-driven web pages.

When combined with a relational database such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and even Microsoft Access, Dreamweaver is one of the most powerful web development tools on the market because the application makes it so easy to interact with databases. In this chapter, you're going to see what it takes to develop database-driven (also referred to as "dynamic") applications and how to add dynamic content to your site.

Note

Some web developers argue that any web page that changes (for example, via rollover buttons, Flash movies, and so on) is a dynamic web pagewhich is technically true. The term dynamic, however, has become somewhat of a technical term in the web community that typically refers to pages that display dynamic content extracted from databases. Throughout this chapter, I'll be using the terms dynamic and database-driven interchangeably.




Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
ISBN: 0789733854
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 337

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