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More on LinuxToday Writing Database Oriented Web Based Applications With Perl - Part I

Mar 05, 2001, 22:10 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Marcelo Pham)

"What is a web based application? A web based application is simply an application that runs over the Internet. The programs run on the web server and interact with the user's browser, without the need of installing them on the client side. Yes, we're going back to the old thin-client architecture that mainframes used to use (IBM 34/36, RPG, wow, that's really old!). Imagine the power of this: a program that is always available, no matter where you are, no matter when you execute it, it's stays there, ready to use."

"This is possible thanks to the CGI (Common Gateway Interface), a protocol that allows scripts to run in the server side sending the result via the web in a simple HTML output."

"Now, a simple web based application has a little logic and some interaction with the user. We won't be talking about counters or mail forms, we want to go further than that, we want our application to interact with databases and run effectively in a heavy traffic multiuser environment as the web is. This will be the main subject of this series of articles."

"This first installment is just an overview and a couple of things to have in mind before proceeding. It's mainly intended to educate developers to design and document in a standard way any application they want to implement. Some things may sound obvious, theoretic and even silly, but it's worth to mention them to do the right thing from the start and, in the long run, you'll see that they will save you a lot of time. After this introduction we will touch more specific and technical issues."

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