Database and Systems Integration

Websites typically, are growing in complexity and functionality. In the past, a website for a business was just a means of getting some information about the business out onto the Internet for all to see. Now, businesses are seeing the Web as a sensible place to not only promote their products and services, but to provide valuable services to their customers, suppliers and prospects. To provide these dynamic services, integration is required between the website and other systems.

Integrated Services
Here are some examples of services that your website can provide to your company stakeholders, as well as the general public:

• Product search / lookup
• Pricing and availability lookup
• Order entry
• Delivery tracking
• Accounting functions such as invoice and statement printing
• Purchase order status updates
• Complaint and issue tracking

Components of an Integrated System
To provide services which allows your enterprise data to be made available through your website, you'll need the following components in the equation:

• A database - This is where all your information is stored. The database handles the efficient storage and retrieval of information such as inventory and accounting data. A database server is the machine that contains the database, and has links to the outside world (or at least other applications) allowing access to that database. Some examples of common, enterprise-level databases are: Oracle, DB2, Informix, Universe, D3 and MySQL.
• An application server - The application server typically handles all your business rules, and often data integrity (if not managed within the database itself). Application programs are written in one or more programming languages and handle the processing of user-requests from the webserver, updates of and retrievals from the database, and other calculations on your business data. An application server can be a standalone component, but is often part of the database itself (for instance, D3 and Universe have a Pick/BASIC programming language), or part of the webserver (example: Zope).
• A webserver - The webserver handles HTTP requests from the user's web browser, and passes those requests to the application server. It "serves out" the web pages that your users see in their browsers. The most common webserver products are apache and Microsoft's Internet Information Services.

How do you do it?
If you are using different servers, whether on the same physical machine or not, the servers will need to be able to communicate with each other. This may require opening certain ports on your system, as well as making available the necessary connectors. For example, your web application server may require a special database adapter to talk to the database. Security of course is an issue here, and security considerations will be discussed later in this series of articles.

Programming efforts will normally be concentrated within the application server environment, but supplementary programming is usually required on the web server, as well as the database server. In summary, your web server accepts a request from the user's web browser, it passes the request to the application server. The application server requests and processes data from the database server, then passes back the information to the web server. The web server finally assembles a page of information which gets sent back to the user's browser.

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