Chapter 20 -- Data Binding

Chapter 20

Included in Microsoft Internet Explorer is a useful and timesaving technology called data binding. Data binding offers advantages to both the Web developer and the user by making Web pages easier to create and update, faster to load, and less dependent on remote servers. It does all this by allowing a Web page's data to be kept locally and separate from the HTML code that formats it. Through what are called data source objects (DSOs), the Web page becomes a kind of template that can be filled with the external data, which can be displayed and manipulated. In this chapter, we'll discuss how data binding and DSOs work, and then we'll explore some examples that use a specific DSO called the Tabular Data Control (TDC). These examples demonstrate how to access the powerful features of data binding with simple scripts. Although Netscape Navigator does not support binding data directly to HTML elements, it does support a DSO called the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) applet, which will also be discussed in this chapter. Finally we'll take a brief look at more advanced aspects of data binding.