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Databases Dig out the DynamismThe Web designer and thinker David Siegel predicted two years ago that much of the effort of Web development over the late 1990s would be spent "providing easy-to-use Web-based front ends to existing databases". 1997 is proving him right. The fastest-emerging group of Web applications are designed to let users summon up database information which helps them buy products, track their accounts and otherwise deal with sites. Why? Because site designers want visitors to do more than just look. Designers - especially designers of commercial sites - want visitors to "interact". "Static" Web pages belong to the wasteland of last week; "dynamic" Web sites have arrived at the cutting edge of site design. And as Siegel foresaw, existing databases represent the simplest way to tailor site activity quickly for individual site visitors. The Database Connectivity FloodYou want product? We're awash with product. More than 50 firms now jostle at the counter to sell you Web database publishing tools - among them Microsoft (Visual InterDev and Active Server Pages technology), Netscape (LiveWire), IBM (Lotus Domino), Apptivity Corporation (Apptivity), and NetDynamics (NetDynamics). Over the past couple of months, this column has looked at three specific Windows 95/NT solutions which take different approaches: Corel's $A299 Webmaster Suite, successor to the company's Web Graphics Suite; Macromedia's Backstage Internet Studio, which comes as a $A599 Desktop version or a heavyweight $A1995 Enterprise version; and Allaire's Cold Fusion, whose newly-released version 3.0 also sells in two versions for $US495 and $US995. The Macromedia and Corel packages both include a no-code Web publishing tool and image editor as part of the package: Macromedia gives you Backstage Designer and a cut-down version of its xRes image tool, while Corel gives you Web.Designer, a licensed version of the Macromedia product, and Web.Photo-Paint, a tailored version of its much-improved Photo-Paint 7. Of the three database connectivity packages, Corel's data package ranks as a solid low-cost entry. It includes O'Reilly's worthy WebSite server software. And it lets you publish data in a Web format from most common data formats, including any SQL (Structured Query Language) data source which complies with Microsoft's ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity) standard. Heavyweights hide CGIBut the more expensive packages, Cold Fusion and Backstage, are very serious tools. They let you do more than just pour your database onto normal Web pages; they let you interact with visitors "dynamically" through pages created by the server to meet users' specifications. Until now, this trick has been performed with what's known as CGI (Common Gateway Interface), a specification which lets servers talk to information sources such as databases. Software packages like Cold Fusion and Backstage aim to eliminate the often complex CGI scripting by sitting a more user-friendly solution on top of the CGI. Macromedia's solution also bundles O'Reilly's WebSite. For interactivity, it lets you drop "Backstage objects" into Web pages (made simple by Backstage Designer). These objects in turn communicate with the special program ("Backstage Server") on the server, which in turn can talk to your database. The dozen objects included with the program will not just query databases but perform a variety of other tasks from the trivial (a page-hit counter) to the more sophisticated (user registration and log-ins, discussion groups). It doesn't appear, though, to allow the easy setting-up of a site-wide text search, an obvious application. And it's far from straightforward; its more sophisticated functions immerse you in expressions, formats and strings. Allaire's Cold Fusion provides a more technical solution for developers comfortable with HTML. It uses the Cold Fusion Mark-up Language (CFML), a series of Web page tags very similar to those used in the HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) of standard Web pages. The Cold Fusion program in the Web server reads these tags and puts together custom Web pages. For anyone who knows HTML, it's a relatively intuitive approach. Like Backstage, it allows on-line catalogues and ordering. It also allows electronic "shopping carts" and "cookies" to identify record visitors' previous site interactions. And Cold Fusion 3.0, just out, includes text searching based on the excellent Verity search engine. Like Backstage, it comes with excellent documentation. Though neither product has been fully reviewed here, Cold Fusion seems the broader of the two, and one of the solutions most likely to challenge Microsoft's strong position. As Allaire co-founder Jeremy Allaire willingly admits, it's Microsoft which poses the biggest threat to all the database field's other aspirants. The ISP LinkCold Fusion, Backstage and similar programs share an obvious drawback: you must put software on the server. If an Internet Service Provider (ISP) hosts your site, you'll have to ask it to install this software and host your database. That's the sort of request ISPs usually turn down. In Melbourne, Cold Fusion has been installed by Web hosting services at Telstra (quite an endorsement) and Internet Access Australia. Darren Deason at design firm TotalNet Presence, which works closely with Internet Access, lauds it for cutting down the time taken to develop large, complex sites. He also reports it is surprisingly stable for a relatively new product. Of course, you can avoid hosting services completely by running your own server and a perm ament Internet link, probably ISDN. That makes some sense. "You can't have ISPs running hundreds of different databases," says Mark Delaney, technical director at Melbourne-based Web hosting experts Mira Networking. He cites Lotus Domino as perhaps the best current solution for businesses using ISPs, saying it allows users to replicate their own database simply on the ISP's machinery. But he adds: "People who are doing serious things with databases really want to run their own server." That's a complex task. Both the Corel and Macromedia packages include copies of O'Reilly's WebSite server software, and both work with Microsoft's free Internet Information Server and with Netscape servers. But even if you can afford a permanent link ($500 a month, say), running a server requires some technical ability. And as Mira's Delaney points out, you'll probably have to reconfigure your existing database for the Web. The result? "People are still pretty nervous about it," says Delaney. Nevertheless, he reflects, it's the next step in linking businesses to the Web.
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Project Cool's Glenn Davis