Understanding Web Applications - Adobe 38040334 - Dreamweaver CS3 User Manual

Chapter 17: Preparing to build dynamic
sites
Before you begin building dynamic web pages, there are a few preparations that must be done, including setting up
a web application server and connecting to a database for Coldfusion, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP applications.
Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS3 handles database connections differently depending on your server technology.

Understanding web applications

About web applications
A web application is a website that contains pages with partly or entirely undetermined content. The final content of
a page is determined only when the visitor requests a page from the web server. Because the final content of the page
varies from request to request based on the visitor's actions, this kind of page is called a dynamic page.
Web applications are built to address a variety of challenges and problems. This section describes common uses for
web applications and gives a simple example.
Common uses for web applications
Web applications have many uses for both site visitors and developers, including the following:
• Let visitors find information quickly and easily on a content-rich website.
This kind of web application gives visitors the ability to search, organize, and navigate content as they see fit.
Examples include company intranets, Microsoft MSDN (www.msdn.microsoft.com), and Amazon.com
(www.amazon.com).
•
Collect, save, and analyze data provided by site visitors.
In the past, data entered in HTML forms was sent as e-mail messages to employees or CGI applications for
processing. A web application can save form data directly into a database and also extract the data and create web-
based reports for analysis. Examples include online banking pages, store check-out pages, surveys, and user-feedback
forms.
•
Update websites that have constantly changing content.
A web application frees the web designer from continually updating the site's HTML. Content providers such as news
editors provide the web application with content, and the web application updates the site automatically. Examples
include the Economist (www.economist.com) and CNN (www.cnn.com).
Web application example
Janet is a professional web designer and longtime Dreamweaver user responsible for maintaining the intranet and
Internet sites of a medium-sized company of 1000 employees. One day, Chris from Human Resources comes to her
with a problem. HR administers an employee fitness program that gives employees points for every mile walked,
biked, or run. Each employee must report his or her monthly mile totals in an e-mail to Chris. At the end of the
month, Chris gathers all the e-mail messages and awards employees small cash prizes according to their point totals.
September 4, 2007
491