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Courses in database driven websites

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  • 24-10-2004 11:35pm
    #1
    cleansingfire
    Closed Accounts Posts: 19 ✭


    I'm looking for advice in good courses that will teach me how to do a database driven website. Has anyone advice?


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    #2
    jmcc
    Registered Users Posts: 7,412 ✭✭✭jmcc


    cleansingfire wrote:
    I'm looking for advice in good courses that will teach me how to do a database driven website. Has anyone advice?
    Difficult call. I don't have that high a respect for academics or these college/night courses around here (Ireland) that claim to teach courses on database driven websites. The reason for my cynicism is that most of the people teaching these courses wouldn't know the difference between a database driven website and a database backed website and in most cases they have a very limited operational portfolio.

    There are some good FAQs and tutorials on the web. Most of them are centred on the standard LAMP solution (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP). In fact the majority of hobbyist and mid range database driven sites would rely on the above solution. This would really mean concentrating on the PHP scripting language and the MySQL form of SQL.

    The Microsoft option tends to rely on IIS and ASP. ASP is another scripting language that can interface with a database, in this case Microsoft SQL Server or Access. Though it can also interface with other ODBC capable databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.

    ASP, and PHP are not that difficult to pick up. It should take a few hours or so before you've learned enough to be dangerous. PHP has a lot of similarities with C. ASP is more Microsoftish. However the majority of work in a database driven/backed website is in getting data from the db and presenting it and putting data into the db from a webpage or form. The hardest part of all is learning to think in terms of the SQL queries you need to extract the necessary data.

    Read some of the material on this url:
    http://philip.greenspun.com/books/

    You have to learn the scripting languages and how they interact with databases in order to build a database driven website. This is really why there are no good courses on how to build database driven websites. Each site, though it has much in common with other sites has a lot of unique aspects. All a course can do is teach you the basics. You really learn by doing and, by making mistakes. A better option may be to do a good course on SQL and pick up ASP or PHP on the way.

    Regards...jmcc


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    #3
    cleansingfire
    Closed Accounts Posts: 19 ✭cleansingfire


    Thanks. Access to experience such as this makes forums like this worthwhile. Cheers.


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    #4
    dangerman
    Registered Users Posts: 1,169 ✭✭✭dangerman


    Hey jmcc,
    the difference between a database driven website and a database backed website

    Could you explain the difference? I don't get it.


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    #5
    jmcc
    Registered Users Posts: 7,412 ✭✭✭jmcc


    dangerman wrote:
    Hey jmcc,
    Could you explain the difference? I don't get it.
    The database driven site essentially pulls data from and posts data to a database. The database stores part of the data but it is a very small, and lightly used, part of the site such as a guestbook or a forum with a few posts a day.

    With the database backed site, the database is the site. The best examples being a heavily used search engine or forum with thousands of simultaneous users. A lot of hardware rules come into play at this level in that the database has to be fast enough and as such it either needs to be held in memory and or duplicated over a number of smaller servers. Also the techniques of caching (publishing frequently accessed data as static webpages) becomes important.

    Designing a site for a few users is easy. Designing a site for hundreds or thousands of users is harder. Most of the courses would probably teach the techniques and rules for developing simple sites but very few people in Ireland would have the experience of developing large database backed sites outside of major companies and boards.ie.

    Regards...jmcc


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    #6
    dangerman
    Registered Users Posts: 1,169 ✭✭✭dangerman


    Ah ok. Yes I get it. I'd never heard that distinction before.

    My site is database backed, handling the awesome mind crushing stats of 100 visits per day. ;)

    Nice explanation, thanks.

    Google is incredible though, I thought this was amazing:
    Everything is served from RAM, only booted from disk. And they have multiple separate search clusters at their co-locations. This means that Google is currently storing multiple copies of the entire web in RAM. My napkin is hard to read with all these zeroes on it, but that's a lot of memory.

    Read entire article here: http://blog.topix.net/archives/000011.html


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