Dreamweaver.MX.1002004.The.Missing.Manual [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

21.1 The Dynamic Edge

So far in this book, you've learned to build and maintain Web sites using Dreamweaver
MX 2004's powerful design, coding, and site management tools. The pages you've
created are straightforward HTML, which you can immediately preview in a Web
browser to see a finished design. These kinds of pages are often called static, since they
don't change once you've finished creating them. For many Web sites, especially ones
that contain a variety of information, static Web pages are the way to go.

But imagine landing a contract to build an online catalog of 10,000 products. After
the initial excitement disappears (along with your plans for that trip to Hawaii), you
realize that even using Dreamweaver's Template tool (Chapter 18), building 10,000
pages is a lot of work!

Fortunately, Dreamweaver MX 2004 offers a better and faster way to deal with this
problem. Its dynamic Web site creation tools let you take advantage of a variety of
powerful techniques that would be difficult or impossible to implement with plain
HTML pages. With Dreamweaver MX 2004, you can build pages that:

Display listings of products or other items like your record collection, your
company's staff directory, or your mother's library of prized recipes.

Search through a database of information and display the results.

Require login so you can hide particular areas from prying eyes.

Collect and store information from visitors to your site.

Personalize your visitors' experience: "Hello Dave, it's been a while since you've
visited. Did you miss us?Hal."

Visit Amazon.com, for example, and you'll find more books than you could read in a lifetime. In fact, you'll find more productsDVDs, CDs, and even outdoor
lawn furniturethan could fit inside a Wal-Mart. In just an hour, you could browse
through hundreds of products, each with its own Web page. Do you really think
Amazon hired an army of Web developers to create each Web page for every product
they sell? Not a chance.

Instead, when you search for a book on Amazon.com, your search triggers a computer program, running on an application server, which searches a large database of
products. When the program finds products that match what you're searching for, it
merges that information with the HTML elements that make up the page (banner,
navigation buttons, copyright notice, and so on). You see a new Web page that's been
created on the spotperhaps for the first time ever (Figure 21-1).

An infinite number
of monkeys couldn't
create all the Web
pages for all the
products Amazon
sells. A dynamic Web
site where pages are
created by accessing
information from a
database is often the
best choice for sites
that present lots of
similar information.

Dynamic Web sites are usually the realm of professional programmers, but Dreamweaver
can simplify routine tasks like viewing information from a database, and
adding, updating, and deleting data. Even if you don't have a programmer's bone in
your body, this chapter and the next few give you the basics.