How to publish Databases on the Web With Microsoft ACCESS and also FileMaker Pro
The Web stopped being a static place a long time ago. Visit any large Web site, and you can be sure that the content you're seeing wasn't hand-coded in Notepad by some caffeine-crazed hack.
Dynamic Web content means that pages can be tailored to browsers, and personalised if you've left your details on the Web site. It also means that the site's developers don't have to worry about the page layout - as templates and content delivery engines enable text and images stored in databases to be turned into Web pages.
Unfortunately, the dynamic Web hasn't reached the free Web space most ISPs give their users. To be honest, this isn't surprising because large-scale Web application servers are expensive beasts to buy, and even more expensive to run. Disk space and a copy of Apache are much cheaper, so your ISP-hosted site is going to be limited to static HTML pages. This doesn't mean you can't take a leaf out of the larger sites' books, though, and use a database to create and manage the content on your site.
One of the most popular Web sites around is Slashdot.org - an Open Source news and gossip site. It's what's known as a Web log or ?blog', a site made up of random musings and their responses. Web logs don't have to be interactive like Slashdot, and you could create your own to keep the world informed of developments in any projects you're running - or just to have an on-line journal.
In this Web Workshop we're going to create a simple Web log application in one of the most widely available home database packages Microsoft Access. You don't have to use Access - the basic techniques are valid for most database packages. Another tool that will give good results is FileMaker Pro, the latest version of which includes a selection of HTML publishing templates that can create attractive Web sites quickly.
As Web-ready office tools haven't been around that long (the first HTML add-ons for Word are only five years old) you'll need to have a reasonably up-to-date database package. Access 97 or Access 2000 will have all the features you need and, if you're using an older database, you can use a text processing language like Perl to turn a CSV text export into HTML.
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com
