The Year 2000, SQL, and DBFs
By Ken North |
We often think of developing for the Web as riding the crest of technological innovation. Many of us rarely use the terms "Web" and "legacy" in the same sentence, but the Web is built on a foundation of legacy technology such as TCP/IP. Avoid the trap of thinking legacy means "old stuff that we should have dumped long ago." If you're perceptive, you recognize that legacy often translates to classic, mature, proven, or widely adopted.
One benefit of some legacy technologies is widespread support and the ease of exchanging content. DVD may be "phat" but VHS provides the greatest access to content -- literally thousands of movies and videos. In some respects, ASCII, SQL, TCP/IP, and DBF are our industry's counterpart to VHS. Two of those terms, SQL and DBF, are known to developers concerned with databases and data access technologies. SQL is a query sublanguage that has been an international standard since 1986. DBFs are files managed by dBASE, Visual dBASE, FoxPro, Clipper, and other xBase products. Many Web sites connect SQL databases to Web servers, and there are numerous solutions, such as DBF-CGI interfaces, for hanging DBFs on the Web. DBFs are a favored means of delivering data from the numerous databases, including government databases, available to Web users. The National Weather Service's AWIPS Program, for example, provides national-scale data sets for public use. The map data is available in DBF format, such as the time-zone file whose visual representation is shown in
