Page 173 - DCAP609_CLOUD_COMPUTING

Cloud Computing

Notes administrate his/her database from home, office, at campus, or on the road. It can be accessed
from any platform, including PC, Unix, and Macintosh systems. HTML-based graphical interface
of the Web-DBMS applications is easy to use for both developers and users, and it allows to
manage databases in a standardized fashion. The network access in Web-DBMS is transparent to
the user - the user does not have to spend time or money for setting up expensive and complex
network software. In short, the main advantages of Web-DBMS are: accessibility, platform
independence, easy-to-use, standardized graphical user interface, and transparent network access.

11.2.1 Lightspoke

Web Based Database Service - benefits of web based database service for business web applications.
Web applications have become the standard in database driven business applications. The reasons
for web based databases’ popularity in the enterprise are:

1. Ease of use: point and click simplicity
2. Accessibility: securely accessible from anywhere
3. Lower total cost of ownership: to secure, scale, deploy and maintain.

Despite these advantages, database driven web applications tend to be expensive to create often
accompanied by a long development cycle and plenty of bugs in its initial use. Furthermore, in
today’s fast paced business world, new database and application requirements emerge faster
than programmers can implement, leaving the business constantly waiting for the upgrade.
Finally, the complexities involved in deployment of the database application often causes a
setback or two before the web application begins to truly benefit the business users.
A web based database service can speed web application development and deployment and
reduce the cost of ownership associated with maintaining the application. Lightspoke is a web
based database service that enables you to create edit publish and share databases securely on
the Internet. Moreover, you can make sophisticated web applications from your databases
through easy to use dashboard, workflow, forms capabilities.

Creating a database and developing a web application to go along with it generally require a
professional programmer - a costly proposition for small businesses/professionals and resource
constrained departments with shrinking IT budgets. As a web-based database service, Lightspoke
provides necessary facilities to create, manage and host a database driven web application
on-line. Lightspoke offers tools to build customized navigation tools to retrieve information,
customized workflow and dashboard facilities to glue your database application together. Better
yet, you can instantly share these database applications securely with team members.

Lightspoke offers pre-built web application templates that can get your database started
immediately. These database driven web applications are ready to use and can be customized
further to better suite your needs. The templates offer various web based database applications
“to go”:

1. CRM Database: Sales Force Automation/Customer Relationship Management
2. Expenses Database: Expense Reporting and Automation
3. HR Database: HR Tracker
4. Software Lifecycle Database: Software Requirements and Bug Management
Lightspoke helps an ordinary business user without programming skills to create and distribute
web based databases on the fly. Web based database services lower the barriers to having and
maintaining a database driven web application. Web based databases are more robust to fast

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