Platinum Edition Using HTML 4, XML, and Java 1.2
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): Eric Ladd
ISBN: 078971759x
Publication Date: 11/01/98

WDB uses what its author, Bo Frese Rasmussen, calls “form definition files,” which describe how the information retrieved from the database should display to the visitor. WDL automatically creates forms on-the-fly that enable the visitor to query the database. This saves you a lot of work when you prepare a script to query a database. The user submits the query and WDB then performs a set of conversions, or links, so the visitor can perform additional queries by clicking one of the links.

	ON THE WEB
	http://arch-http.hq.eso.org/wdb/html/wdb.html Visit the WDB home page for further information on WDB.

Web/Genera

Web/Genera is a software toolset that is used to integrate Sybase databases with HTML documents. Web/Genera can be used to retrofit a Web front end to an existing Sybase database, or it can be used to create a new one. When using Web/Genera, you are required to write a schema for the Sybase database indicating what fields are to be displayed, what type of data they contain, what columns they are stored in, and how you want the output of a query formatted. Next, Web/Genera processes the specification, queries the database, and formats an HTML document. Web/Genera also supports form-based queries and whole-database formatting, which turns into text and HTML.

The main component of Web/Genera is a program called symfmt, which extracts objects from Sybase databases based on your schema. After the schema is written, compile it using a program called sch2sql, which creates the SQL procedures that extract the objects from the database.

When you have compiled the schema, you can retrieve information from the database using URLs. When you click a link, the object requested is dynamically loaded from the Sybase database, formatted as HTML, and displayed to the visitor.

Web/Genera was written by Stanley Letovsky and others for UNIX.

	ON THE WEB
	http://gdbdoc.gdb.org/letovsky/genera/ For additional information on Web/Genera, along with downloading the latest version, visit its page.

MORE

MORE is an acronym for Multimedia Oriented Repository Environment, which was developed by the Repository Based Software Engineering (RBSE) Program. MORE is a set of application programs that operates in conjunction with a Web server to provide access to a relational (or Oracle) database. It was designed to enable a visitor to access the database using a set of CGI scripts written in C. It was also designed so that a consistent user interface can be used to work with a large number of servers, enabling a query to check information on multiple machines. This expands the query and gathers a large amount of information.

	ON THE WEB
	http://rbse.jsc.nasa.gov:81/DEMO/ Visit the MORE Web site for additional information on MORE and RBSE.

DBI

DBI’s founder, Tim Bunce, wanted to provide a consistent programming interface to a variety of databases using Perl. Since the beginning, others have joined to help build DBI so that DBI can support a wide variety of databases through the use of a database driver, or DBD. The DBD is simply the driver that works as a translator between the database server and DBI. A programmer has to deal with only one specification, and the drivers handle the rest transparently.

So far, the following databases have database drivers. Most are still in testing phases, although they are stable enough to use.

	ON THE WEB
	http://www.hermetica.com/technologia/DBI/ Visit this site for the latest developments on DBI and on various database drivers; authors continue to develop this interface where DBDs are being built for additional databases.

DBGateway

DBGateway is a 32-bit Visual Basic WinCGI application that runs on a Windows NT machine as a service to provide World Wide Web access to Microsoft Access and FoxPro databases. It is being developed as part of the Flexible Computer Integrated Manufacturing (FCIM) project. DBGateway is a gateway between your CGI applications and the database servers. Because your CGI scripts only “talk” with the database gateway, you need to be concerned only with programming for the gateway instead of each individual database server. This performs two functions—programming a query is much easier because the gateway handles the communication with the database, and scripts can be easily ported to different database systems.

The gateway enables a visitor to your site to submit a form that is sent to the server. The server hands the request to the gateway, which decodes the information and builds a query forming the result based on a template; or, it can send the result of the query raw.

	ON THE WEB
	http://fcim1.csdc.com/ Visit this site to view DBGateway’s user manual, view the online FAQ, and see how DBGateway has been used.

Additional Resources on the Web

Additional information on Web database gateways is found at the Web-Database Gateways page at

http://gdbdoc.gdb.org/letovsky/genera/dbgw.html

and also on Yahoo! at

http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/World_Wide_Web/Databases_and_Searching