Database Development with Sapphire/Web
By Julian Shifrin and Donna Oliva
The real potential of the Internet lies in the use of database technology to create cost-effective corporate intranets and useful, dynamic, and truly interactive World Wide Web sites. Database systems provide the juice that powers intranet and Web systems that allow companies to distribute or sell products, services, and information.
One new cross-platform tool is Bluestone's Sapphire/Web, a powerful visual application builder designed specifically for creating applications for the World Wide Web and internal Web sites. We examined Sapphire/Web as a potential tool for automating the creation of Web pages that interact with databases.
What We Learned
In evaluating version 1.1 of Sapphire/Web, we found that it does indeed help experienced developers to quickly create distributed applications that use HTML documents as the front-end user interface, and to access Sybase, Oracle, Informix, and other legacy database systems.
Sapphire/Web uses Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs to link HTML documents into a single project or application, and to enable database access. It includes an integrated visual-development environment as well as an extensive set of tools and APIs, and it automatically generates C/C++ based CGI executables.
Because a visual HTML editor is not provided and the resulting code is generated in C/C++, development with Sapphire/Web requires a good working knowledge of HTML, SQL, C, and/or C++ This an industrial-strength tool for serious CGI developers.<>
