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(the successor to ASP) components. Today, the .NET Framework is the basis
for all application development using Microsoft technology.
As an alternative to the Microsoft technologies, Sun Microsystems
developed the Java platform, which includes the Java programming lan-
guage, Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), and Java Server Pages (JSP),
in the 1990s. Sun Microsystems was purchased by Oracle Corporation in
2010, and the Java platform is now part of the Oracle family.
Although the .NET and Java technologies are important development
platforms, additional technologies have been developed by other companies
and open-source projects. We will use two of these independently developed
tools in this chapter--the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE)
and the PHP scripting language.
This chapter also considers one of the most important recent develop-
ments in information systems technology. It discusses the confluence of two
information technology subject areas: database processing and document
processing. For more than 20 years, these two subject areas developed in-
dependently of one another. With the advent of the Internet, however, they
crashed together in what some industry pundits called a technology train
wreck. The result is still being sorted out, with new products, product features,
technology standards, and development practices emerging every month.
However, before considering these standards, we need to gain some
perspective on the data environment that surrounds the Web server in
Internet technology database applications.
We have used the View Ridge Gallery, and the VRG database we have designed and imple-
mented for the gallery, as our example throughout most of this topic. We started by creating
the VRG data model in Chapter 5, the VRG database design in Chapter 6, and implemented
that database design in SQL Server 2012 in Chapter 7. We used it as the basis of our discussion
of database redesign in Chapter 8 and of database administration in Chapter 9.
Now that we have created the VRG database, we will use it in this chapter as the basis for
developing a Web database application for the View Ridge Gallery. We will call this Web database
application the View Ridge Gallery Information System (VRGIS), and the VRGIS will provide
both reporting and data input capabilities for the gallery. But before we build the VRGIS, we need
to understand the underlying basis and process for developing Web database applications.
The environment in which today's database applications reside is rich and complicated. As
shown in Figure 11-1, a typical Web server needs to publish applications that involve data of
dozens of different data types. So far in this text, we have considered only relational databases,
but as you can see from this figure, there are many other data types as well.
Consider the problems that the developer of Web server applications has when integrating
these data. The developer may need to connect to an a database created in Oracle Database, a
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