Web Databases and Application Servers (Was: Microsoft Access)

[Chris Gray]

As long as we're getting into this sort of thing....

A good place to start are the articles in WebReview on Web databases and
application servers.

http://webreview.com/wr/pub/1999/02/26

The Web databases articles there are done by John Paul Ashenfelter who has
a good book (Choosing a Database for Your Web Site) out covering many of
the issues and comparing a lot of the software alternatives including
Access, FrontPage, ASP, ColdFusion, and much else.

ColdFusion is an application server with its own markup language to
supplement HTML.  There are open source free alternatives here.  Zope is
a Web application platform that runs both on Windows and UNIX.

http://www.zope.org/

php3 is also free and cross-platform.

http://www.php3.org/

These can all interface to various free or shareware databases.  The most
sophisticated one around is PostgreSQL.

http://postgresql.nextpath.com/

Chris Gray
Library Systems
University of Waterloo

On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Dan Lester wrote:

> At 01:17 PM 6/2/99 -0700, Darryl Friesen wrote:
> >It's probably an OK database to use as a backend, but it certainly wasn't
> >designed to do what you want, and I don't think you'll ever be satisfied with
> >just it, nor the Word mailmerge approach suggested (now you have two hammers).
> >
> >If your webserver is NT I'd suggest looking at active server pages.  They'll
> >let you do the update/edit forms, as well as generating pages and doing
> >searches on the fly.
> 
> And you'll do even better, and write faster and cleaner code, if you use 
> Cold Fusion.  Yeah, it costs some non-trivial bucks, but you'll save it 
> back quickly.
> 
> dan
> 
> 
> --
> Good, Fast, and Cheap: Which two of the three would you like?
> Dan Lester, 3577 East Pecan, Boise, ID 83716 USA 208-383-0165
> dan at 84.com   http://www.84.com/  http://www.idaholibraries.org/ 
> http://library.boisestate.edu/ http://www.lili.org/ 
> http://www.postcard.org/ http://www.idaho.anglican.org/ 
>