Cooking with Visual InterDeve and Enterprise Application Ingredients
By Ken North
@Normal=
My April 1999 column presented the first of several installments that will use the cookbook approach to implementing database-enabled Web pages. That column discussed installing software and designing a database, two prerequisites to laying out database-enabled Web pages. It also surveyed the tools and technologies of Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 (VS6).
This month's theme is enterprise applications involving large numbers of users and complex database schemas. We'll continue exploring Visual InterDev (VID), Microsoft's principal product for authoring database-centric Web pages. VID offers something for developers at various experience levels. For Web developers light on programming experience, it's easier to jump into VID and scripting than it is to learn Java, C++, or Visual Basic (VB). Performance-oriented applications usually require developers who are more experienced. They can accomplish more with VID by applying their Visual Basic, Java, or Visual C++ (VC++) skills.
Not every VID developer is writing enterprise applications, but if you plan to, it helps to understand problems such as scalabilityand technologies such as data modeling. When developers use rapid application development (RAD) tools such as VID, they often adopt an ease-of-development model that produces default behaviors. This can introduce performance problems that are often resolved by moving away from the default development paradigm and default behaviors.
