Read an Excerpt
PREFACE:
Preface
The Informix Web DataBlade is one of the most versatile products on the market today for connecting the web to the database. Creating and managing dynamic web content across the enterprise is crucial to web-enabling databases for business—but information on how to do this, how to make the right design decisions and then make it all perform well, is sparse and scattered across multiple volumes of formal documentation. Information on how to integrate all this with Java and JavaScript is nonexistent. This book integrates all the relevant material, including some of the unpublished tips that hard experience brings.
While working with customers to deploy this technology, it became clear that a conceptual Rubicon was crossed in almost every case, and that integrating the different technologies required a simple but clear understanding of the position of each in the overall web systems architecture.
One day in the early 1990s, I, then knowing nothing about the Internet, dialed in to it. I was unprepared for what followed. The concentrated excitement of being able to download tons of information, about almost any subject I was interested in, was impossible to resist. As a professional programmer working with database management systems, I knew I had to master the technology and link it to a database. That excitement, what Shaw called "the seventh degree of concentration," persisted into many long nights of coding, uploading, and downloading.
When I began to use the Informix Web DataBlade, I felt the same excitement at how simple it was to manage the world of rich content and enterprise data. One of the great contributions thatInformix makes to the Internet community is the ability to manage this content and deliver it over the Internet; with rich content and mission-critical data merging into information, Informix' technical brilliance is well positioned to leverage that information and deliver it to the growing world of the e-customer.
Developers come to the web wanting to use JavaScript and Java, and the next step is integrating the database. This book will synthesize all three for novice web developers, database administrators, consultants, and experienced developers wanting to understand the wider issues involved. Non-database programmers will have the power to access the database from the web with little or no SQL knowledge.