Chapter 46: Building a Web Application

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Overview

One of the key advantages to Macromedia Dreamweaver as a Web-development tool is the inclusion of visual tools to build data-driven, dynamic Web pages — without extensive knowledge of complex, server-side programming languages needed to create a Web application. A Web application is a collection of static and dynamic Web pages that is accessed via a Web browser or other HTTP user agents, generally working in conjunction with a database. Using a database to store the information you want to display enables you to separate a site's HTML design from its content, and building a Web application makes it possible to rapidly obtain, store, retrieve, display, and otherwise modify content on demand.

Dreamweaver works with all the major server technologies — Macromedia ColdFusion (CFM), Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) and ASP.NET, Sun JavaServer Pages (JSP), PHP Hypertext PreProcessor pages (PHP) and PERL to process your site's data. You can take advantage of Dreamweaver's predefined server behaviors or write your own.

The exercises used in this chapter are on the CD in the chapter46_exercise folder rather than in the text of this chapter. Look for the "On the CD-ROM" icons to see where exercises are optionally available in the exercise files. A text file with all steps will be listed.

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