Generating odd-shaped webs from databases?

[Albert Lunde]

What experiences have people had with generating web content from databases?

What would you recommend as particularly good examples of this sort of thing?

At NU, my co-workers are doing some work with Oracle and their web
interface. This is being applied to fairly structured data like course
descriptions (just going into production) and the university calendar (still
in development). For what it's worth, you could compare the old approach
(done by hand):

http://www.nwu.edu/academic/coursedesc/spring96/

and the new pages generated from a database:

http://now.nwu.edu/registration/owa/course_descriptions.school_list

But it seems like this approach is difficult to extend to less structured
information; it takes a fair amount of coding behind the scenes to generate
the pages, and some advance forethought to design the database.

Do you have ideas that would be useful in generating a web of more diverse,
heterogeneous pages while still maintaining consistent inclusions and
cross-references?

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    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu