Designing Dynamic, Database-Driven Web Sites

Spend enough time designing for the Internet and you will quickly realize HTML's limitations. Websites produced with HTML are static. It requires a great deal of effort to expand and update a large site created with HTML. Dynamic, database-driven design gives you the ability to customize and modify content while generating thousands of pages on the fly. All this for little more effort than producing static websites.

4D focuses on methods for designing robust web sites that employ such tools as MySQL, PHP, XML, and ASP. The goal of this site is to provide users with an overview of the concepts and technologies associated with database design for the Web, as well as to give some basic instruction about developing database-driven sites. Areas covered include:

Technology Overviews and Product Reviews
What does it take to create a database driven website. These essays look at the various components and how they work together.

JSP Java Server Pages: Web developers often use Java programming to add functionality to static HTML pages. Before long Java Server Pages emerged, using Java to was used to deliver dynamic content over the web.

Tutorials
Now that you know a little more about dynamic design, you may be ready to do a little. of your own. Our tutorial section focuses on the PHP and MySQL technologies used in the 4D site.

An Introduction to MySQL: MySQL is an open source relational database management system. Like many modern databases, it uses SQL, the industry standard language for creating, updating and querying relational databases. SQL consists of a relatively small vocabulary, and is often imbedded inside of other code, such as PHP. This tutorial is an introduction to using a telnet command line program to communicate with and update a database in MySQL.

Web Resources
What better place to learn about internet technologies than the internet itself. This central resource connects you with more information on the technologies and concepts introduced by 4D.

Here's a random link: Microsoft ASP

Glossary
Want to learn more about databases than you ever thought possible? The glossary offers easy-to-understand definitions of technical terms in the categories of data management, delivery, and presentation technology.

Surrogate Key: A unique primary key generated by the RDBMS that is not derived from any data in the database and whose only significance is to act as the primary key. A surrogate key is frequently a sequential number (e.g. a Sybase "identity column") but doesn't have to be. Having the key independent of all other columns insulates the database relationships from changes in data values or database design and guarantees uniqueness. Some database designers use surrogate keys religiously regardless of the suitability of other candidate keys. However, if a good key already exists, the addition of a surrogate key will merely slow down access, particularly if it is indexed., that is, data which depends on time in some way.

Design Documents
This section contains the various documents illustrating our design process. Users can download PDFs on site architecture, page diagrams, categorization schemes, and MySQL table designs.