The development of powerful Web applications that provide dynamic HTML pages using information stored in databases is a hot and quickly evolving area. This book is a concrete, step-by-step introduction for programmers. The problems it addresses are arranged in order of increasing complexity of their solutions. In the course of the discussion, the goals are refined as well, in order to give more adequate, efficient, fault-tolerant, and secure solutions for the main problem. All the main bottlenecks of creating, administering, and operating an information provider Web site are discussed. By the end of the book, the programmer will have learned how to create and operate an efficient, scalable, and robust Web site to provide information securely and in real time.

The first solution presented is static and HTML-based. Rodley shows how to put the data into a database and how to query for content from a browser by using the CGI interface of Web servers. After discussing the drawbacks of CGI, he gives solutions using NSAPI/ISAPI, MSC with exception handling, Java, JDBC, the Java Internet class library, Java authentication classes, and finally the Secure Socket Layer. He discusses security issues by showing different Web server, firewall, and relational DBMS architectures. At the end of each chapter, a “Webliography” is given.

The solutions are clarified by comprehensively described examples. For this reason, the author must be concrete. Of course, the solution depends on the tool and language variants being used. For the sake of generality and independence, the author has chosen standards-based solutions, and he explains the effects of choosing particular tools. For practical reasons, generally available tools are chosen: Windows NT, Netscape Web tools, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft C, ODBC/JDBC, and Java and its Internet class library. A CD comes with the book to make the examples easier to use. The tools are introduced at the beginning of the book. Rodley offers his help via the Web, including corrections to errors in the text and on the CD. The book uses examples to introduce the tools and languages. While they are not described comprehensively, the tool and language features used in the solutions are explained well.

The book gives practical, proven, and widely applied techniques. It does not deal with JavaScript, Perl, or other scripting language–based solutions, because Java-based solutions overlap them, and the author describes himself as a wild-eyed Java evangelist. He also omits the newest technologies based on CORBA IIOP, DCOM, object-relational or object-oriented DBMSs, and middleware tools (including transaction monitors and the ODBC generalization of Intersolv). The problem of secure transactions on the Web (for example, by using public-key encryption tools such as RSA and PGP) is not mentioned.