Datasheet

Chapter 1

Pros and Cons of Data-Driven Web Sites

Some of the advantages of having a data-driven system are immediately apparent, but there are others

that are less tangible and not so readily evident. Naturally enough, there are also reasons why you might

not want to attach a web site to a database. In this section, we'll examine the benefits and the drawbacks

of creating a web site that's based around a data source.

Advantages

There are many secondary benefits of making a web site data-driven, such as the ability to reuse

portions of functionality in other projects, and being able to share common pieces of information across

systems – these tend to kick in when you start to work on your second or your third web application.

Here, we're going to look at some of the advantages that can start to accrue as soon as you make the

decision to create a data-driven site:

❑ Quality and timeliness of content. The most immediate advantages to making a site data-driven

are the speed with which new information can be presented on the Web, and the controls that

can be put in place to guarantee the quality of this information. Rather than having to get a

web designer to create a page containing the information, and then get it uploaded again

every time a price changes or a new product is added, a tool can be created that enables the

instant publishing of new or updated information simply by modifying the database. This is

one of the key benefits of the Web over traditional media – the ability to view information in

real time, rather seeing than a snapshot of old data. By enforcing rules on who can add and

amend data, how it is checked, and whether it is approved, data can be verified prior to being

published in a much more rigorous manner, ensuring that the user only sees accurate details.

❑ Functionality. The other main benefit of storing all of the data required for a site in a database

is that of improved functionality in terms of the actions that the user can perform on the

system. Rather than producing 'catalogues', which (like this book) just have an index and a

contents table as a means of searching, forms can be created that allow the user to specify

what is being looked for, and have the system scour the database for that information. A great

example of this is a search engine. Without a database, such a site would present only a

manual categorization of other web sites, with a huge structure of pages that you could (try to)

navigate between.

❑ Maintenance. With the data for a site stored in a separate location from the presentation code,

there is no longer a need to maintain static links in HTML files between related sections of a

site, forcing you to reapply formatting and menu structures to hundreds of pages each time the

site is redesigned. In a data-driven system, web pages are typically templates that act for entire

classes of pages, rather than having one page for each piece of information.

As an example of this, you could imagine the on-screen appearance of a page that displays the

details of a product for sale. Rather than this being a separate HTML page, in a data-driven

system there would be one page containing fields and tables that could be populated with data

regarding any product. This means that there is far less to do each time a redesign is

implemented. Similarly, as the relationship between different pieces of information can be

stored in the database (rather than hard-coded in the pages), links to related products and

other information can be generated on the fly.