Web Database Development Step by Step

"This book teaches you how to create database applications that operate on the World Wide Web. If you know how to create ordinary Web pages, know a little about databases, and want to integrate the two, this book is for you."

"Any Web site (or portion of one) that presents information about a collection of like items is a candidate for using a Web database."

"Databases exist to serve the needs of applications. An application, in turn, is a unit of software that exists to serve the needs of some activity."

"If you've created or used any code values in your database design, it's often valuable to have a table relating code values to code descriptions."

"In relational technology, the process of organizing fields into tables is called normalization because with each step, the design approaches the relational standard (that is, the relational norm) more closely."

"Structured query language—SQL—is the way that applications usually send commands to relational databases."

"Open database connectivity is a data source that provides access to many relational database systems."

"Some applications need to perform multiple database updates on an "all or nothing" basis."

"For these reasons, obtaining server-side script resources from your service provider or IT department is usually more difficult, more expensive, or more restrictive—or all three—than obtaining nonscripted Web space."

"A digital certificate is a scrap of data that contains one or several named fields, and is encrypted (or checksummed and the checksum encrypted) with a private key belonging to the Web visitor."

"Developing Web database pages usually requires two Web servers: one for you to use while developing and another for Web visitors to use when accessing the finished application."

"When a Web server responds to an incoming request, it transmits one or more header records before it transmits the actual content."

"Unlike HTML, which was designed to control the visual appearance of information, XML is totally and exclusively designed for transmitting structured data from one computer to another or from one application to another."

"The parser can check an XML document for valid content, but for this it needs a document type definition (DTD)."

"XSL encompasses two main components: a transformation language and a formatting language."

"XML deals with the storage, description, and interchange of data—not with its visual presentation."

"Tuning database usage generally provides greater payback than optimizing your application code."