Summary

In just over seven years, e-commerce database technology has become the common user interface of choice for many information dissemination systems. Whereas, RDBMSs have been the cornerstone for information warehousing for years. The integration of the two technologies have made rapid advances over the last few years. This rapid explosion has led to new challenges for IT managers and developers. There are several competing technologies available that often do not address the issues of heterogeneous environments and Web-based application development. This chapter addressed the challenges of designing and implementing e-commerce database-integrated Web sites. Furthermore, it focused on e-commerce database-Web integration difficulties in heterogeneous database environments.

Before one can design or manage e-commerce database interfaces to Web sites, he must understand the evolution of Web technology. The Web has evolved to become the electronic information dissemination and presentation of choice in networked environments. Web technology started as a means of disseminating text documents and establishing relationships with other text documents. The technology evolved where other media such as graphics, audio, and video files can be disseminated via the Web. Because there is a wealth of valuable information in databases, the integration of Web sites with e-commerce database technology is a natural progression of Web technology. The Web provides a common user interface, whereas the database provides the logical structure of storing and manipulating data^[2].

When a technology evolves at a rapid pace, there are some inherent limitations and incompatibilities that information managers and developers must face. For example, the Web was not designed to maintain state efficiently. There are methods of maintaining state by using environmental variables or setting cookies. The manager or developer must understand these limitations to satisfy the growing information dissemination and collection requirements via the Web.

Besides the limitations of the Web, there are many issues regarding database access via the Web. First, the developer must choose a database interfacing technique(s). There are many proprietary solutions such as Cold Fusion, Microsoft’s ActiveX Data Object (ADO) via Active Server Pages, and others. In addition, each major database vendor has their own Web database interface solution. Oracle has its Web Developer Suite, whereas Sybase has its web.sql product. There are open standards or solutions such as PERL’s DBI and PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). There are legacy systems in which interfacing is very difficult. In addition, building Java applications using JDBC has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Each method has issues dealing with support, development time, system performance, scalability, robustness, migration, and so forth. The information manager or developer’s decision is made even more difficult when contending with many different types of databases in a heterogeneous environment.

Designing and implementing Web sites that interface with databases is very challenging and requires detailed planning and analysis. An IT manager or developer must thoroughly understand Web technology, database interfacing methods, and database technology along with the issues each technology has in relation with e-commerce and other technology. This chapter served as a guideline and reference for information managers and developers for addressing these issues in their respective environments.

Finally, the Internet will continue to evolve into the mainstream of the world. As a result, the amount of content on the Web will continue to grow. Database technology is the enabling technology in which logic can be applied to the input and retrieval of information. More Web sites will connect to databases to take advantage of the logical operations of a database. Large organizations with heterogeneous environments will implement Web-database solutions that can be applied throughout their environment.

As previously explained, there is a myriad of database interface solutions available to the developer today. However, there are not many that can be effectively applied to heterogeneous environments. The foremost is using ODBC to interface with your databases. The developer must be careful with ODBC because not all ODBC drivers and resources are built the same. There are incongruent aspects of various ODBC products in the market today. JDBC is another option. You must use Java on the server side or your scripting language must connect to JDBC resources.

The future seems very bright for database access in heterogeneous environments using Java on the server side. Java and JDBC on the server side will free the developer from worrying about what operating system is used and what database is used. The developer is free to focus on the e-commerce application itself.

^[2]Vacca, John R., The Essential Guide to Storage Area Networks, Prentice Hall PTR, 2001.