Alternatives for Dynamic Web Development Projects

I was recently afforded the opportunity to work with the internet department of a large medical publishing firm located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The department assisted the company's various marketing departments with regard to content destined to be posted on the Internet as well as coordination of scheduling and placement of content on the company's web site. Ultimately the department served as a conduit between various marketing and product management departments at sites in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and the Baltimore-based IT department that physically housed the company's web servers.

As a result of these activities, there were a great many files finding their way into the department via a number of paths. Most arrived by e-mail, some on diskette via interoffice mail and some were uploaded directly to ftp servers in Baltimore. This created a flurry of activity as the marketing staff and developers in the department attempted to organize and coordinate a variety of content. To add to the confusion, there were also numerous versions of documents that were submitted due to last-minute changes made by the supported departments. My task was to develop an interim solution to reduce the confusion created by content submission activity by organizing all the various content in one central application. I attempted to do this by building a small web application prototype that would serve to track each project's title, manager, department, department code and cost accounting code.

The application needed to be built quickly and cheaply because constraints in the purchasing and tenuous acquisition processes ruled out any new requisitions until the beginning of the next fiscal quarter. It needed to run on standard PC equipment that was readily available in the department. Technical support for the application by experienced system administrators would be limited. The applications needed to be light, fast, easy to use, stable and easily maintained by the department's staff that approached web development from a marketing, as opposed to technical, perspective. Despite the fact that this was the Department of the Internet, the focus of the department's activities was on content coordination. The IT department administered the heavier-duty web servers and telecommunications that were off-site.

This document will relay the lessons learned from my investigation into the software tools required and available for building a rudimentary, dynamic internet application. Consideration will be given to commercial and free software alike. We'll begin with some definitions and background of the elements of a dynamic web application and then continue on to a tour of some of the available technologies. It is my intention that this article serve as an informative starting point for developers and would-be developers as they begin to seek solutions for their web application development requirements.

Advanced web designers often use a scripting language called JavaScript and a system of naming the parts of the web page—the Document Object Model, or DOM—together with HTML and CSS to create dynamic content on a page. These effects are sometimes called Dynamic HTML or DHTML. I, however, am limiting the scope of this project to building a web site that will generate dynamic content by interacting with a database. I was not interested so much in effects displayed to the user but in focusing on building an intuitive web application. The project scripts will be executed at the server, not at the client as occurs with JavaScript. The tools and methods presented here will not limit the addition of interactive or stylistic features to the application at a later time.

Data is defined as a general term meaning the facts, numbers, letters and symbols processed by a computer or communications system to produce information. In a computer system these items are typically stored in files. A collection of related files is a database. Within these files, records of items are organized into rows and columns. In this case, I need something more sophisticated than a simple collection of files.

The project requires a RDBMS, or Relational Database Management System. An RDBMS is a software package that stores data in rows and columns as tables. Various tables can be related to one another in order to answer questions posed by the end user. These questions are known as queries. The RDBMS is a concept first introduced by Codd in an academic paper in 1970 but was not commercially available until the mid 1970s. The RDBMS responds to all queries whether they ask the RDBMS to retrieve, add, update or delete data from the tables.

Sometimes the RDBMS that services a web site is called the back end. The web pages that the end user will see is often called the front end. Questions are posed to the back end using a language called SQL (Structured Query Language). In short, if there is data that needs to be processed, a DBMS of some kind is required. The most popular at this time are Relational DBMS, that respond to questions/commands via SQL.