Other Freeware Solutions Available on the Internet

A number of Web pioneers have successfully integrated relational databases with Web pages using HTML browsers. Among them are:

isqlperl

Bill Hails (bill@tardis.co.uk) created user subroutine libraries to compile into Perl allowing access and very simple selects of tabular data for INFORMIX-OnLine databases.

• Library creates cursors to allow select of single rows
• Requires in-depth knowledge of Perl
• Requires Perl version 4.036, Informix ESQL/C, isqlperl source code
• Works well with simple database structures. Support of complex structures (such as multiple joins) is difficult
• Geared towards simple selects
• Maximum concurrent open cursors only defined at run time
• No known support for inserts, updates, deletes, and BLOB data types

GSQL

GSQL is a gateway program that provides a Mosaic-based, HTML form interface to SQL databases. It creates forms based on commands found in proc files, and then assembles the user inputs into a SQL query that a DBMS can process.

The gateway consists of two programs, GSQL and SQLMAIN. GSQL is the form-creation program. SQLMAIN is the database back-end program that processes queries. GSQL parses an SQL-specification file (called a PROC file) to create a form and then with the user inputs, calls a database back-end program to process the SQL query. The PROC file maps components of the SQL string to widgets (fields, buttons, pulldown menus, etc.) for user input or selection. GSQL is a clean and easy public domain gateway to use.

• Requires in-depth knowledge of C
• Works well with simple database structures. Support of complex structures (such as multiple joins) is difficult if not impossible to support
• Geared towards simple selects
• No known support for inserts, updates, deletes, and BLOB datatypes

WDB

WDB is a Web interface to SQL databases created by Bo Ferese Rasmussen. WDB now directly supports Informix databases.

WDB is a software toolset that simplifies integration of databases into the World Wide Web. WDB lets you provide WWW access to the contents of databases without writing much code. An API module for isqlperl to WDB was created by Curtis K. Wong (curtis@crl.com) to provide a CGI interface for NCSA's HTTP server. Also needed are a set of high-level form definition files which describe particular views of the database.

WDB automatically creates HTML forms, on-the-fly, to allow users to query the database, and -- given the users' query constraints -- it will query the database and present the results to the user. WDB also includes a utility to automatically extract information about a table from the database and create a working template from a definition file.

• Library creates cursors to allow select of single rows
• Requires an in-depth knowledge of Perl
• Requires Perl version 4.036 with isqlperl source code
• Works well with simple database structures. Support of complex structures (such as multiple joins) is difficult if not impossible to support
• Geared towards simple selects
• Maximum concurrent open cursors only defined at run time
• No known support for inserts, updates, deletes, and BLOB datatypes

CISAMperl

CISAMperl is a Perl interface to Informix's library of C functions for managing indexed sequential access method (ISAM) files. C-ISAM provides quick data access for applications that need simple indexed, record-oriented data files.

• Does not include all features of an RDBMS
• Works well with simple database structures. Support of complex structures (such as multiple joins) is difficult if not impossible to support
• Geared towards simple selects
• No known support for BLOB data types, inserts, updates and deletes

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