QuoteUnquote
Our experience with Oracle, ColdFusion & Solaris combined left us with a very bad taste in our mouth. It turns out that the ColdFusion port for Solaris wasn't as mature as the NT port, in fact, CF for Solaris wasn't even a native port to Solaris, which caused quite a bit of trouble, including countless nights spent baby-sitting the server.
-- Anand Lal Shimpi, in an article on the Search for the Perfect Servers.
Leading Titles
There are a number of popular desktop databases, including Microsoft Access, Corel Paradox, FileMaker Pro, and Lotus Approach. (Note that this category does not include "back office" products such as Oracle or SQL Server.)
There are also some SQL databases, such as the popular open-source title MySQL, that, thanks to their ready availability, have become ubiquitous enough they, too, are worthy of mention here. MySQL is most commonly used with a front-end based on PHP, Perl or Python, to deliver database-driven news, listings or website management tools. But, as is the case with any database, the types of data potentially handled are practically unlimited.
In this article, we'll look at some of the most popular desktop databases used in building and delivering data-driven web applications.
Database-driven solutions
FileMaker: A recent Government Computer News review found that MS Access might be the most potent database manager of the four most popular databases for Windows, but concluded that FileMaker's "sheer ease and logic make it well worth the $250 (US) price." The site known as "A FileMaker Affliction" presents an intro to the theory of how to design a database and provides a complete FileMaker glossary in The Filemaker Designer: Building a better main file" FileMaker.com also offers FileMaker Developer 5, a version of the program capable of creating stand-alone databases (unfortunately, without some of the program's network functionality). The company has a developer page, called FileMaker XML Central, with a number of useful tools and tips.
RBASE is another long-time stalwart of the PC database scene. Originally a DOS-based product, recent releases from the company (under new management) have embraced Windows. We've seen a beta release of version 7 of RBASE. It improves the interface and web-based functionality of the already impressively powerful 6.5 release, which we used for a recent job that required its advanced programmatic calculation capabilities. It, too, can create standalone DBs. Tools for converting older RBASE DBs into the new program's format are available separately, at extra cost.
Allaire's ColdFusion (www.macromedia.com) web application server is one of the best-known database-driven web application servers, and it is generally considered the highest-performance solution in its class -- particularly when paired with SQL Server 7, or another enterprise-class database system. (It is, in fact, the solution we use here at PC Buyer's Guide. -- Ed.) To web-enable a database with Cold Fusion, you run the Cold Fusion Server on your Windows or Linux-based web server (or, as detailed in the quote at the top of this page, on a Solaris box at your peril), and specify an ODBC data source -- say, a Microsoft Access or SQL database. Then, HTML-like Cold Fusion constructs are set up on web pages to query the database, or add new info to it. Cold Fusion pages are most easily constructed with the help of Allaire's Cold Fusion Studio page editor, but they can be created with nothing more than Notepad, if you prefer. And, because the code runs entirely on a server, the client access is accomplished entirely through a web browser, and is fully cross-platform compatible.
In 2001, the company released a version of ColdFusion Server for Linux, and updated its Windows-based offering with Windows 2000/XP compatibility. There's also a free, limited-functionality version of Allaire ColdFusion Web application server available for download. It lets you immediately start creating web applications for everything from database reporting to employee directories. When you're ready to scale, the projects you develop with ColdFusion Express can be easily and seamlessly upgraded to an advanced edition of ColdFusion Server.
Allaire's high-end, ecommerce-enabled application server product is called Spectra. It provides modular and customizable services for content management, e-commerce, and personalization. The first Allaire Spectra site in Canada was fifty-plus.net.
DAZone's WebDbBuilder is a product developed in Korea that is touted as a complete framework for integrating Web and database technologies. A demo version is available for free download. It supports Win9x/NT or Unix/Linux databases. MS-ACCESS DB support is provided for Windows95/98/NT, while PostgreSQL DB is included for Linux/UNIX compatibility. An explanation of the procedure to build your own database using the product helps explain how it works.
Microsoft's Office, with the web-enabled database features in Access, is a popular low-end solution, but the company's SQL Server (or even Small Business Server, which is based in part on SQL Server) and the forthcoming Exchange 2000, with its innovative Web Store, will address more sophisticated needs. See our reports on Exchange 2000 and SQL Server 2000 for additional details.
The next version of Microsoft's SQL Server will reportedly handle a virtually unlimited array of data types, with the ultimate goal of full integration of this free-form data engine into the version of Windows currently code-named Longhorn.
MySQL and PHP for the foundation of several driven web authoring systems, including the popular PHP Nuke, Slashcode and numerous "Slashalikes." There are also some database-driven web interfaces written in Perl and other languages. A popular Perl title is NewsPro. It is based on a simple, non-relational internal database, as is its successor, Coranto (both of which we use on various areas of this site). In addition, Coranto can use a SQL database, for more robust data handling. MySQL is included with most non-Microsoft operating systems, including Apple's Mac OS X and many Linux distros.
Conclusion
As is the case with desktop publishing tools or virtually any other category of software, the best tool is the one that gets your job done most efficiently. There are so many issues other than speed to deal with -- security and robustness being only two of the most important -- that any discussion of benchmarks or performance without accounting for these factors is practically meaningless. For what it's worth, we see an awful lot of web sites having MySQL problems, and Microsoft ASP problems are notoriously common. For what it's worth, we consider FileMaker the most viable choice for quick database development, and we consider ColdFusion the best-performing product we've used. Linux- or BSD-based developers (etc.) should consider the more reliable PostgreSQL as an alternative to MySQL. Microsoft's SQL Server is capable of impressive performance on high-end hardware, but on lesser systems -- particularly if the database is running on the same machine as a Web server -- performance can be downright pokey.
For Further Reading
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