At the onset of the World Wide Web, websites were built with HTML, which was static. Whenever a company needs to update the contents, a technical staff would open the page, edit the changes, and then upload it to the server. This could be a tedious and expensive process for businesses.

An alternative was to use CGI/PERL to write programs that could link the website to a database. But Perl is a difficult language to learn, and it takes a long time to develop web applications. Middleware technologies like ColdFusion, ASP and PHP, became popular for developing websites. A middleware acts like a translator between the hosting server, database and the browsers. These middleware languages are easier to learn and have english-like commands, and thus, development time is faster.

What can database connectivity do to your website?

1. Provide Dynamic Content - Did you ever check out popular news site and wondered how they get updated easily? This is because the content is being read from the database. There us a secure content management system where a staff/writer adds new articles. These articles are actually inserted into the database. The new articles are then read from the database and displayed on the public wesbite.
   
   
2. Searchable Web Content - When you type in a movie title to search an e-store selling DVDs, it actually does a search on the database and will pull-up a match based on the keywords you typed in.
   
   
3. Workflow - A lot of work processes can be duplicated on the web. For instance, a school can accept student registration on their website.
   
   
4. Intranet/Extranet - information that is exclusive only to a certain group is possible with a database backend. You can use a database to keep track of business documents.
   
   
5. eCommerce - Updating existing product catalog and keeping track of your sales, require database connectivity.
   
   
6. Web Portals - A website that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, discussion groups, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience.

Almost any database application can be duplicated on the web. This makes information accessible virtually to anywhere in the world. With database connectivity, the possibilities are unlimited.

For a free demonstration, send us an email by filling out the form on the Contact Us page.