Hands on: Dynamic data

Over the years we’ve looked at web development, one of the things that has remained constant has been the need for many people to create sites that change in some way, rather than the static text of the first web generation.

There are many ways to do that; simple CGI scripts can rotate graphical elements or pull in headers and footers that might add info using server side includes or server parsed pages.

And then there are more complicated scripting languages, such as Perl and PHP.

For many casual web developers, the combination of PHP with the MySQL database is a popular way to code sites.

You can create database driven pages that are easy to update and provide a great deal of customisation for visitors by remembering what they last looked at and so on.

Interactive or dynamic?
Before we go further, it’s worth considering the terms ‘dynamic’ and ‘interactive’. On the whole they are not interchangeable.

I’m going to refer to sites as dynamic if they’re driven by a database backend that essentially creates a page and delivers it to the user; that might be based on the information they entered into a form, or chose from a menu, or their preferences.

But essentially an ordinary-looking page is sent from the web server to the browser.

When I talk about interactive sites, I mean those in which the page isn’t fixed; it may change in look or in the information displayed, based on how the user interacts with it.

That might include fancy Javascript menu systems or scripts that check for errors before submitting a form.

We’ve not looked at these in detail in Hands On Web Development but we’re going to explore the topic more over the next few months. Don’t worry, we won’t jump in at the deep end.

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