Database Access with Java and Active Server Pages
By Arthur Casale
Iam continually astonished by the sheer number of technologies you deal with when developing Web database-applications. Just as amazing is the seemingly infinite number of ways these technologies can be knit together to form a solution. A case in point is a recent project that utilized HTML, Java, Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) and the Access 97 database. The application was simple: Allow a Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer user to issue the query "show me all employees in department XYZ and their current salaries" against an ODBC-compliant database on the server.
In this article, I'll share my experiences and show you how I assembled these various technologies to create this application. My objective is not to explore the capabilities and syntactic nuances of the technologies utilized, but to "baseline" several technologies and illustrate how they can be effectively integrated to form a seamless end-to-end, albeit no-frills, interactive-database solution. Each piece of the application can, of course, be expanded at your discretion to include additional functionality.
Application Architecture
The application's interaction allows a user to select a department number from a drop-down list in a Java applet and initiate a query by pressing a "Go" button. The Java applet passes the department entered to an ASP program sitting on the host server.
