Web-enabled Database Access – a Key for establishing of National-wide Information Services V. Vassilev#, P. Staynov♦, C. Kostov♣
Abstract The process of globalisation of the information services through the Internet and World Wide Web in particular is intensively ongoing world wide. No doubt, it is important for the emerging Information Society. Moreover, it could also serve an important technology for solving some of the painful problems of the Central and East European countries, which face serious difficulties due to the lack of funding. The present paper deals with the analysis of some technical and organisational issues related to the development of national information services for possible access to the large databases over the Internet in different domains – governmental institutions, municipality and corporate administration, veterinary and health services, museum funds, etc. On the basis of case studies of several key projects the most important technologies as well as working experience in Bulgaria are discussed.
1. Introduction The recent development of the technology for building intranets over the World Wide Web promises drastic change for wide spreading of information systems, especially regarding the process of establishment of national-wide and large-scale information systems and services. Unlike the classical client-server technology, which produces closed information systems and normally requires strong technical infrastructure, the remote access to the databases requires only standard components. Typically it could be implemented using dial-up or leased-line connection to the Internet plus free Web browsers only. Such a technology is especially important for the Central and Eastern European countries from the previous Soviet block for at least two reasons. First, our countries just start establishing of national-wide services, which are common in the contemporary Information Society: ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Customs, Taxes and Banking Management over the territory of the country Governmental State, Regional and Municipal Administration within both central and local branches Veterinary and Medical services for export/import control of the trade with agricultural products Business initiatives targeted at advertising, electronic commerce and online subscription to centralised information services Contemporary Art, Cultural and Heritage Management for international presentation of the museum treasures and national achievements Management Information Systems over company intranets and virtual private networks
Second, the investments for building adequate infrastructure for establishing distributed intranets and virtual networks are much smaller. Typically it is not necessary to install sophisticated equipment; no complicated maintenance is required, either. The present paper reports some projects, which could be accounted for better policy making in this direction, as well as both positive and negative experience acquired in Bulgaria during last years. #
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences – Institute of Information Technologies and New Bulgarian University – Department of Computer Science; e-mail:
[email protected] ♦ Computer Arts, Ltd. and New Bulgarian University – Department of Computer Science; e-mail:
[email protected] ♣ New Bulgarian University - Center for Computer Networking and Electronic Communications; e-mail:
[email protected]
2. Web-enabled database access There exist several approaches for building remote database access over the World Wide Web, depending on the underlying protocol for transmitting data between the Web and the database servers: • • •
Over standard database protocols (OCI/ODBC/JDBC) through direct CGI programming of the typical data operations for selecting, inserting, updating and deleting of data records. Firmware solutions, such as Active Server Pages of Microsoft, Web Application Server cartridges of Oracle, Informix datablades, etc. Over IIOP protocol using CORBA or RMI using Java through building abstract software architectures.
The general architecture for implementation of both thin and thick clients requires at least two components: database server(s) for data processing in LANs and Web listener(s) for communication channel over the Internet. Althought all alternative approaches could be used for building remote database applications in principle [1], in most of the cases the technical choice is dependent on the underlying database software mainly. Typically, the new solutions could be build from scratch using software from one vendor, but often there are situations, where the database is already available and the architecture could become quite a mix of tools and formats.
2.1. Web classics: CGI Programming of Web server procedure invocation for open database access This is the oldest approach for building database applications over the World Wide Web, which is supported by both the commercial Web servers available on the market, as well as by the popular public domain servers, like Apache. It completely resembles the possibility to approach standard relational databases over standard protocols, such as ODBC/JDBC or OCI from the Web server itself. For passing parameters to the RDBMS it typically follows the CGI standard for external procedure invocation as the only communication channel [2]. For example, most of the old searching engines operating over the Web could be approached directly over the HTTP protocol as virtual URL’s of the following types: http:\ IP-name>\cgihttp:\\, containing CGIcgi-bin is a real directory on the Web server with Internet name
