SLIDE 1IS Fall 2002 Database Applications: Using ColdFusion University of California, Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems SIMS 257: Database Management

SLIDE 2IS Fall 2002 Lecture Outline Review –Databases for Web Applications – Overview ColdFusion DiveShop in ColdFusion

SLIDE 3IS Fall 2002 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.

SLIDE 4IS Fall 2002 Dynamic Web Applications 2 Server database CGI DBMS Web Server Internet Files Clients database

SLIDE 5IS Fall 2002 Server Interfaces Adapted from John P Ashenfelter, Choosing a Database for Your Web Site DatabaseWeb Server Web Application Server Web DB App HTML JavaScript DHTML CGI Web Server API’s ColdFusion PhP Perl Java ASP SQL ODBC Native DB interfaces JDBC Native DB Interfaces

SLIDE 6IS Fall 2002 Web Application Server Software ColdFusion PHP ASP All of the are server-side scripting languages that embed code in HTML pages

SLIDE 7IS Fall 2002 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

SLIDE 8IS Fall 2002 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

SLIDE 9IS Fall 2002 What ColdFusion is Good for Putting up databases onto the Web Handling dynamic databases (Frequent updates, etc) Making databases searchable and updateable by users.

SLIDE 10IS Fall 2002 Requirements Unix or NT systems Install as SuperUser Databases must be defined via “data source names (DSNs) by administrator

SLIDE 11IS Fall 2002 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.

SLIDE 12IS Fall 2002 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... SELECT * FROM contents ;

SLIDE 13IS Fall 2002 Templates cont. Contents of My Shopping Cart Contents of My Shopping Cart #Item# #Date_of_item# $#Price#

SLIDE 14IS Fall 2002 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

SLIDE 15IS Fall 2002 CFIF and CFELSE Item: #Item#

SLIDE 16IS Fall 2002 More Templates INSERT INTO Employees(firstname, lastname, phoneext) VALUES(‘#firstname#’, ‘#lastname#’, ‘#phoneext#’) Employee Added Employee #firstname# #lastname# added.

SLIDE 17IS Fall 2002 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 messages Perform HTTP and FTP function Perform credit card verification and authorization Read and write client-side cookies

SLIDE 18IS Fall 2002 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.

SLIDE 19IS Fall 2002 PHP Syntax Similar to ASP Includes most programming structures (Loops, functions, Arrays, etc.) Loads HTML form variables so that they are addressable by name <?php $myvar = “Hello World”; echo $myvar ; ?>

SLIDE 20IS Fall 2002 Combined with MySQL DBMS interface appears as a set of functions: <?php $db = mysql_connect(“localhost”, “root”); mysql_select_db(“mydb”,$db); $result = mysql_query(“SELECT * FROM employees”, $db); Printf(“First Name: %s \n”, mysql_result($result, 0 “first”); Printf(“Last Name: %s \n”, mysql_result($result, 0 “last”); ?>

SLIDE 21IS Fall 2002 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

SLIDE 22IS Fall 2002 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) & “ ” Response.Write(resultline) people.movenext loop%>

SLIDE 23IS Fall 2002 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

SLIDE 24IS Fall 2002 Text Search Options

SLIDE 25IS Fall 2002 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?

SLIDE 26IS Fall 2002 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

SLIDE 27IS Fall 2002 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

SLIDE 28IS Fall 2002 ColdFusion Diveshop Examples from Fusion

SLIDE 29IS Fall 2002 Next Time More on SQL, including introduction to ORACLE –ORACLE Account information –ORACLE Documentation