Web-Based Databases

12.7 Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the Web-based database (WBDB) concepts and classified the WBDB architecture into two-tier architecture, three-tier architecture, and hybrid architecture according to the database access methods. Then the existing tecnologies used in WBDB were introduced as different generations, i.e., technologies for the traditional Web (Generation 1), the fast and more interactive Web (Generation 2), the Java-based Web (Generation 3), and a new generation. Based on these introductions, we discussed the challenges and provided some solutions for current WBDB. We also pictured a future framework of WBDB, which serves interaction and valuable data retrieval, and presented function descriptions of three layers. Through describing the services of three layers in the later framework, we proposed that the intelligent or semantic queries will be the new trend on the basis of a semantic Web. Besides, agent-based services occupy more and more important roles in the WBDB areas of scalability and extensibility. Finally, we addressed how to develop WBDB applications using JDBC. The JDBC package is a set of Java classes that can be used by applications to make database calls on the Internet. Examples presented in the chapter show that the development of WBDB using JDBC is quite interesting and convenient.