Post on 22-Dec-2015
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 1
Database Applications:Using ColdFusion
University of California, Berkeley
School of Information Management and Systems
SIMS 257: Database Management
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 2
Lecture Outline
• Review– Databases for Web Applications – Overview
• ColdFusion
• DiveShop in ColdFusion
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 3
Why Use a Database System?• Database systems have concentrated on
providing solutions for all of these issues for scaling up Web applications– Performance– Scalability– Maintenance– Data Integrity– Transaction support
• While systems differ in their support, most offer some support for all of these.
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 4
Dynamic Web Applications 2
Server
database
CGI
DBMS
Web Server
Internet
Files
Clients
database
database
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 5
Server Interfaces
Adapted from John P Ashenfelter, Choosing a Database for Your Web Site
DatabaseWeb Server
Web ApplicationServer
Web DBApp
HTML
JavaScript
DHTML
CGI
Web Server API’s
ColdFusion PhP Perl
Java ASP
SQL
ODBCNative DBinterfaces JDBC
Native DB
Interfaces
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 6
Web Application Server Software
• ColdFusion
• PHP
• ASP
• All of the are server-side scripting languages that embed code in HTML pages
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 7
ColdFusion
• Developing WWW sites typically involved a lot of programming to build dynamic sites– e.g. Pages generated as a result of catalog
searches, etc.
• ColdFusion was designed to permit the construction of dynamic web sites with only minor extensions to HTML through a DBMS interface
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 8
ColdFusion
• Started as CGI– Drawback, as noted above, is that the entire
system is run for each cgi invocation
• Split into cooperating components– NT service -- runs constantly– Server modules for 4 main Web Server API
(glue that binds web server to ColdFusion service) {Apache, ISAPI, NSAPI, WSAPI}
– Special CGI scripts for other servers
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 9
What ColdFusion is Good for
• Putting up databases onto the Web
• Handling dynamic databases (Frequent updates, etc)
• Making databases searchable and updateable by users.
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 10
Requirements
• Unix or NT systems
• Install as SuperUser
• Databases must be defined via “data source names (DSNs) by administrator
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 11
Requirements and Set Up
• Field names should be devoid of spaces. Use the underscore character, like new_items instead of "new items."
• Use key fields. Greatly reduces search time. • Check permissions on the individual tables in
your database and make sure that they have read-access for the username your Web server uses to log in.
• If your fields include large blocks of text, you'll want to include basic HTML coding within the text itself, including boldface, italics, and paragraph markers.
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 12
Templates
• Assume we have a database named contents_of_my_shopping_cart.mdb -- single table called contents...
• Create an HTML page (uses extension .cfm), before <HEAD>...
• <CFQUERY NAME= ”cart" DATASOURCE=“contents_of_my_shopping_cart"> SELECT * FROM contents ; </CFQUERY>
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 13
Templates cont.
• <HEAD>• <TITLE>Contents of My Shopping Cart</TITLE>• </HEAD>• <BODY>• <H1>Contents of My Shopping Cart</H1>• <CFOUTPUT QUERY= ”cart">• <B>#Item#</B> <BR>• #Date_of_item# <BR>• $#Price# <P>• </CFOUTPUT>• </BODY>• </HTML>
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 14
Templates cont.
Contents of My Shopping Cart
Bouncy Ball with Psychedelic Markings 12 December 1998 $0.25
Shiny Blue Widget 14 December 1998 $2.53
Large Orange Widget 14 December 1998 $3.75
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 15
CFIF and CFELSE
<CFOUTPUT QUERY= ”cart"> Item: #Item# <BR><CFIF #Picture# EQ""> <IMG SRC=“generic_picture.jpg"> <BR><CFELSE> <IMG SRC="#Picture#"> <BR></CFIF></CFOUTPUT>
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 16
More Templates
<CFQUERY DATASOURCE = “AZ2”>INSERT INTO Employees(firstname, lastname,phoneext) VALUES(‘#firstname#’, ‘#lastname#’,‘#phoneext#’) </CFQUERY><HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Employee Added</TITLE><BODY><H1>Employee Added</H1><CFOUTPUT>Employee <B>#firstname# #lastname#</B> added.</CFOUTPUT></BODY></HTML>
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 17
CFML ColdFusion Markup Language
• Read data from and update data to databases and tables
• Create dynamic data-driven pages• Perform conditional processing• Populate forms with live data• Process form submissions• Generate and retrieve email messages• Perform HTTP and FTP function• Perform credit card verification and authorization• Read and write client-side cookies
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 18
PHP
• PHP is an Open Source Software project with many programmers working on the code.– Commonly paired with MySQL, another OSS
project– Free– Both Windows and Unix support
• Estimated that more than 250,000 web sites use PHP as an Apache Module.
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 19
PHP Syntax
• Similar to ASP
• Includes most programming structures (Loops, functions, Arrays, etc.)
• Loads HTML form variables so that they are addressable by name
<HTML><BODY>
<?php
$myvar = “Hello World”;
echo $myvar ;
?>
</BODY></HTML>
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 20
Combined with MySQL
• DBMS interface appears as a set of functions:
<HTML><BODY><?php$db = mysql_connect(“localhost”, “root”);mysql_select_db(“mydb”,$db);$result = mysql_query(“SELECT * FROM employees”, $db);Printf(“First Name: %s <br>\n”, mysql_result($result, 0 “first”);Printf(“Last Name: %s <br>\n”, mysql_result($result, 0 “last”);?></BODY></HTML>
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 21
ASP – Active Server Pages
• Another server-side scripting language
• From Microsoft using Visual Basic as the Language model (VBScript), though Javascript (actually MS Jscript) is also supported
• Works with Microsoft IIS and gives access to ODBC databases
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 22
ASP Syntax
<% SQL="SELECT last, first FROM employees ORDER BY last" set conn = server.createobject("ADODB.Connection") conn.open “employee" set people=conn.execute(SQL)%><% do while not people.eof
set resultline=people(0) & “, “ & people(1) & “<BR>” Response.Write(resultline) people.movenextloop%><% people.close %>
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 23
Text Search
• Native text searching within databases is very poor.– Involves a full scan of the database to resolve “LIKE”
queries.– Text fields are limited in size
• For example Oracle VARCHAR has a maximum of 4000 bytes
• LONG (BLOBS, etc) fields support larger data, but are not indexable and can’t be used in WHERE clauses.
• Some Databases offer Text retrieval add-ons – Oracle’s interMedia or ConText Text retrieval engines– Informix Text DataBlade– IBM DB2 Text Extender
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 24
Text Search Options
Search Engines Manufacturer Price PlatformAltavista Search Intranet Altavista $16,000 Unix, NTCheshire II, Cha-Cha UC Berkeley Free or ? UnixDig Open Source Free Unix Fulcrum Knowledge Net Fulcrum $5,000 Unix, NTIndex Server (MS) Microsoft Free NTInfoMagnet CompassWare $5000+100 NTNetscape Compass Netscape $1,295 Unix, NTPLWeb Turbo Personal Library Softw. $7-10000 Unix, NTRetrievalWare Excalibur $12,500 Unix, NTVerity Information Server Verity $5,000 Unix, NTUltraseek server Infoseek $1,000 SolarisWebinator Thunderstone Free or $700 Unix, NTWebGlimpse Univ of Tucson Free or $200 Unix, NT
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 25
Features to look for
• Ranked and Boolean Search
• Proximity search
• Fielded searching
• Concept expansion
• Spider for Indexing
• Document types available– HTML, PDF, XML, MS-Office, Multimedia?
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 26
Other Options
• Have an external search engine crawl and present your site.– Inktomi provides portal sites for customers– Snap uses Inktomi to do the same sort of
thing
IS 257 - Fall 2002 2002.10.22- SLIDE 27
Conclusions
• Database technology is a required component for large-scale dynamic Web sites, especially E-Commerce sites
• Web databases cover most of the needs of dynamic sites except for text search
• Many solutions and systems are available for web-enabled databases and search engines