Web info systems
Aulis Sibola
Abstract

Today we can’t imagine ourselves without web: we read newspapers from the web, we read and write our e-mails in the web, we watch movies on the web, we pay our bills on the web, we buy our clothes and even food from the web. Web has become a part of our everyday life. We have got web-stores, Internet banks, portals, search engines – we have got almost everything in the web. The web has become a part of so called e-business.

All those web systems relay on the similar architecture: somewhere there is a database and the data in this database can be viewed and as need arises even modified through the web.

The web info system can be built using one of the following techniques: CGI, ISAPI, server-side scripting. Although CGI is the oldest and slowest there are still places where it can be used. ISAPI applications and server-side scripting are the most popular techniques today and most web sites are built based on them.

Database access in the Microsoft Windows environment can be achieved by using Microsoft Universal Data Access components: OLE DB, ADO and ODBC – all of them are widely used and they all give developers a lot of options to work with different type of data.

Web info system can be viewed as multi tier application: there is database, there are database components, there is web programming and there is user interface.