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Unit 14: Application Development and Administration

of its older members. In this world, storytellers, magicians, and grandparents were considered Notes
great and honored storehouses for all that was known.
Apparently, and according to vast archeological data, campfires were used (like command-line
middleware) by the younger members of the community to access the information stored in the
minds of the elders using API’s such as:

public String TellUsAboutTheTimeWhen(String s);.
And then of course, like a sweeping and rapidly-encompassing viral infection, came agriculture,
over-production of foodstuffs, and the origins of modern-day commerce.

Dealing with vast storehouses of wheat, rice, and maize became quite a chore for the monarchs
and emperors that developed along with the new economy. There was simply too much data to
be managed in the minds of the elders (who by now were feeling the effects of hardware
obsolescence as they were being pushed quietly into the background).
And so, in order to store all the new information, humanity invented the technology of writing.
And though great scholars like Aristotle warned that the invention of the alphabet would lead
to the subtle but total demise of the creativity and sensibility of humanity, data began to be
stored in voluminous data repositories, called books.
As we know, eventually books propogated with great speed and soon, whole communities of
books migrated to the first real “databases”, libraries.
Unlike previous versions of data warehouses (people and books), that might be considered the
australopithecines of the database lineage, libraries crossed over into the modern-day species,
though they were incredibly primitive of course.
Specifically, libraries introduced “standards” by which data could be stored and retrieved.
After all, without standards for accessing data, libraries would be like my closet, endless and
engulfing swarms of chaos. Books, and the data within books, had to be quickly accessible by
anyone if they were to be useful.

In fact, the usefulness of a library, or any base of data, is proportional to its data storage and
retrieval efficiency. This one corollary would drive the evolution of databases over the next
2000 years to its current state.
Thus, early librarians defined standardized filing and retrieval protocols. Perhaps, if you have
ever made it off the web, you will have seen an old library with its cute little indexing system
(card catalog) and pointers (Dewey decimal system).
And for the next couple thousand years libraries grew, and grew, and grew along with associated
storage/retrieval technologies such as the filing cabinet, colored tabs, and three ring binders.
All this until one day about half a century ago, some really bright folks including Alan Turing,
working for the British government were asked to invent an advanced tool for breaking German
cryptographic “Enigma” codes.

14.1 Database and the Web

The Web is the cornerstone of electronic commerce. Many organizations offer products through
their Web sites, and customers can place orders by visiting a Web site. For such applications a
URL must identify more than just a file, however rich the contents of the file; a URL must
provide an entry point to services available on the Web site.
It is common for a URL to include a form that users can fill in to describe what they want. If the
requested URL identifies a form, the Web server returns the form to the browser, which displays

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