Chapter 1: Displaying Data on the Web

Chapter 1 - Displaying Data on the Web
byJohn Kauffman, Fabio Claudio Ferracchiatiet al.?
Wrox Press ?2002

Overview

When the Web first appeared, people had to find a metaphor for how information should be presented on it. If you took a sample of web sites from that period, the content largely was based around what you'd find in traditional media such as books, magazines, and newspapers. This led to the Web serving the same purpose as those other formats: it provided a snapshot of information as it stood at the time the pages were created. Of course, there was nothing wrong with that, but it placed restrictions on what the Web could reasonably be used for.

Over time, the technologies powering the Web have matured, and it has changed from only being able to provide static sites, to providing dynamic applications as well. These applications invite their users to make choices about the information they're interested in, providing a customized user experience that can be modified in real time.

The key to these applications is the data they contain. Regardless of what it is - it could be a product catalogue, or a set of customer details, or a document repository - it's the data that makes them dynamic. In the past, providing data over the Web has been a harder task than providing it through traditional desktop applications, due both to the development tools and functionality available, and the nature of the Web itself, where users are far removed from the applications and data. Over time, and in particular (from our point of view) with the introduction of Microsoft's .NET Framework, this situation has been improved. Web application developers are now on a more equal footing with their desktop-developing counterparts.

In this first chapter, we'll provide a broad introduction to the topic of data-driven web sites, and how they are implemented in ASP.NET. It starts with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of data-driven sites, and then moves on to examine the sources that such data can come from. After that, we'll look at the .NET Framework's data access strategy of choice - ADO.NET - including its architecture, its classes, and how it fits into the structure of data-driven applications. We'll finish by covering the installation of a database server that we'll use throughout this book.

Note 

A data-driven web application is a web site that displays dynamic data. The user experience changes to reflect the information held in a data store.