DIY Data-driven Web Applications

These days, there is no shortage of online office suites. They come with all sorts of features. Google Docs & Spreadsheets only has a word processor and a spreadsheet, for example, while Zoho has almost everything imaginable from a word processor to a CRM application. But few suites, especially free ones, can boast about database.

One possible reason for this apathy towards databases could be that few people really do useful things with them. On the face of it, a database appears to be a must have application. But it is not as widely used as word processors or spreadsheets. The reason is simple. Building a database to store real-life data needs some understanding of data relationships and retrieval.  It is not easy to build a useful application even with Microsoft Access, perhaps the friendliest of databases. As a result, Microsoft Access shows up as a "rarely used" application on most people’s computers. And if people hardly use desktop databases, there seems to be little reason to include a database in online office suites.

While desktop users largely ignore Microsoft Access, it has found a sizeable following among builders or small-business websites. It needs little setup on Web servers. Besides, deploying an Access database on a website does not require a license. Still, not everyone can build Access based online application. The problem is that building such applications needs a considerable knowledge of programming environments like ASP and ASP.Net. Not many small-business owners have those skills. So they end up hiring someone to build their data-driven websites.

Now there is nothing wrong in hiring an expert for programming complex data-driven applications. But many applications that go on small-business websites are often quite simple, conceptually. Take a lead generation application, for example. All that the programmer has to do is to capture the information a user enters and store it in a database. If there were a point-and-click environment for doing it, most people could build their own websites.

Enter online databases. They are built from ground up with one purpose in mind: gathering and publishing information online. To work with them, you must still understand data relationships and must be able to perform basic tasks such as creating data tables. But you don’t need programming expertise to build and deploy web applications with them.

If you wish to explore building a data-driven website with online databases, you should start with Caspio (www.caspio.com). There are others too — QuickBase from Intuit, the maker of Quicken, for example. But Caspio is a good candidate to start with because it comes with a free SOHO account. The SOHO account is sort of limited in that you can only use it to build an application with a maximum of two web pages. But it is sufficient to introduce you to the power of online databases. Here is how you can build a data-driven application with it and publish it to your website:

1. Go to www.caspio.com and sign up for a SOHO account. The sign up is quite simple. All you need to provide is an id of your choice, your name, your e-mail address, and your phone number. They don’t ask you for your dog’s name or the make of your first car. You get a confirmation e-mail with your password right away and you can immediately start using your database.
2. Once you log in, you will see a window that will remind you of Microsoft Access. If you have used Access, you don’t need to be told what to do. If Microsoft had an online version of Access, this is how it would look. You get 50MB of storage space with the SOHO account and you can create as many tables and views as you want, so long as your data doesn’t exceed 50MB.
3. Once you create your tables, you can enter data in a grid that appears to be straight out of Access.
4. Now you are ready to create your datapages. Datapages are the web pages that you create and publish to your website. Datapages can either be web forms which you can use to enter data online or they can be report pages that extract data from the database and display it on your website. Building datapages is just like creating Access forms and reports. You select the tables and the data elements, called columns, from those tables. You then specify the conditions that the records in your database must meet to be included on the datapage. The entire process is wizard driven. At the end, the wizard asks you how you want to publish your pages. You have several options. You can choose to show the page in a frame on your website, in an inline frame or as a link on one of your pages, or even as a redirect to a URL on Caspio’s site. Depending on your choice, Caspio generates HTML/JavaScript code that you can copy and paste on a Web page on your site. That’s it. If you have cut and paste code for Google Analytics or AdSense, you will have little difficulty in pasting code.

To get you started, your Caspio SOHO account comes with a pre-built lead generation application that you can try integrating with your website. Actually, Caspio has several pre-built applications such as displaying real-estate listings, but they all require more than the two datapages that a SOHO account allows for. So you can’t play with those.

If you like what you can do with Caspio, you can upgrade to a paid account which allows for more datapages, or you can move on to other online databases like QuickBase. If you don’t want a back-end for your website, but just want a Microsoft Access-like access-anywhere database, Caspio will work well for you too.

Online databases are not very common today, but that is likely to change as DIY Web design environments such as Microsoft Office Live become more popular.

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