Hiding a MySQL database behind a web page
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-11-15 13:32:53 - Graham Ellis"Keep the browser simple - with a single route in (http) to a server." That's the philosophy behind the web and one of the things that's made it a huge success. It means that a straightforward browser can contact a single server, and Joe Public, Joan Whiting and Mahatma Ali can all view content. But that means that the complexity of storing and accessing data has to be dealt with on the web server, and the straightforwardness of the browser interface is counterbalanced by some quite complex server side systems. It makes sense, really - for every 1000 browsers there might be one server, and it's far better to have one complicated system that a thousand.
Yesterday afternoon, I put together a demonstration showing these various server side elements. A browser, contacting a web server. And then, behind the scenes, the web server running a Perl program via the CGI interface, and that Perl program in turn contacting a MySQL database server for the actual data. And another couple of sample programs (at the proof of concept level) to add more data to the tables. It's rather a long demo so that - rather than post it all here - I've put a full description in our solution centre here and I've put all the source files here. You can even try out the general display page, the Add Operation Page and the Add Patient pages ... although (for server security) I've commented out the line that would save your additions to the tables on our live server I'm not going to risk people entering patients who's names read like adverts!
The demonstration uses the example of medical patients and the operations that have had in two MySQL tables, joined to produce the final results, but the same principles would apply to estate agents selling houses, and to railway trains making station stops!