Hello,

I want to know how I can put my database on the WWW.

The database contains clients information, it must be accesed by 10 people, in diverent places. It is made with VB and Acces 97.

Must I have a webserver, or a program to get it on the WWW. How can I secure my database. Are there any other problems I can have. What are the costs of a good program.

I want to thank you for reading my question.

AEBridge b.v.

This is a good question, and one that, in a variety of forms, many Visual Basic developers are asking as they try to adjust to the world of the Internet and the web. It's also a particularly significant question: although many consider client-side scripts or animation or graphics the ultimate in web interactivity, the web won't be truly interactive medium until the ability not only to display, but also to update, database information is both efficient and widely available.

If you want to make information available on the web, you'll need a web server to disseminate it. Since 10 accesses (which presumably are unlikely to occur simultaneously) is a fairly small load, you may find Microsoft's Personal Web Server for Windows 9x or Windows NT adequate for your needs. Personal Web Server is a low-performance, single-threaded (as near as I can tell) version of Microsoft Internet Information Server, the web server bundled with the Server Edition of Windows NT. Personal Web Server for Windows 95 is available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/ie/pws/default.htm; Personal Web Server for Windows 98 is included on the Windows 98 CD-ROM.

Exactly what you need to do to make your database information available depends on whether you want it to be read-only or read-write. You can "publish" a read-only version of your database information by using the Publish to the Web wizard included with Access 97 (select the Save as HTML option from the Access File menu to open it) and generating either static HTML or Dynamic HTML. This assumes, though, that the information in your database is itself fairly static, since you'll have to run the wizard each time that you modify your database.

If the information in your database is dynamic, so that static web pages just aren't sufficient, I'd recommend an ASP application that accesses the data and builds a web page dynamically that it returns to the client. In this case, whenever the client requests the page, they're seeing the most up to date information from your database. This type of information is extremely easy to build with Access: once again, use the Publish to the Web wizard, only this time select the Active Server Page option.

But you may have something more ambitious in mind, like a dynamic queries or updates to the database based on user input. In this case, I'd recommend that you use Active Server Pages to handle output to the client browser and the display of the user interface on the browser, and develop an ASP component to handle the data access and updates. The ASP component can be written in Visual Basic and in turn can rely on ADO (or ActiveX Data Objects, Microsoft's relatively new data access technology) for retrieving information from and writing information back to your data source. If you're already familiar with DAO, making the transition to ADO should be relatively painless.

As it happens, later this month, we'll be publishing Developing ASP Components, by Shelley Powers, a book that covers ASP component develop in C++, Visual Basic, and J++. Chapter 10 of the book, which is entitled "Creating N-Tier ASP Components Using Visual Basic," discusses the design of a web application that updates data, and contains a good deal of code that you can use with modification for your own application. I highly recommend it.

I hope that this provides you with a good sense of where to begin with your application.

--Ron

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