Subtitles of the Movie

Imagine if you will, a website that is say devoted to selling some kind of product and they don't have a particularly sophisticated web programming system maybe they’re just using Notepad or something like that and their purchasing manager comes up to their web developer and says hey guess what, I’ve just decided that we’re going to stock another type of product, could you please ensure that the details of that product are on our website and web developer goes 'sure, great' and goes to his web developing source and finds that there are already 350 different pages devoted, each one of them is devoted to one particular product that the company sells and he goes and copies and pastes and ends up with the 351st page. And now the managing director comes to the same web developer and says well I want to make sure that each of those 351 pages accurately reflects the current stock levels for each product, in other words, every time somebody buys one, I want the current stock level to go down by 1. How much work would that be for the programmer to be manually updating each of those 351 pages each time something got sold of course it would be a nightmare. So instead he wouldn't have 351 pages, he’d just have a couple of pages. One of them would be say a template for a product description and every time the user requested a particular product description it would reach into the database that was connected to the website, pull out the details about that one product, fit them into the template and display the results. A bit like what we just saw in active server pages. This is so much less work for the web developer. It's a bit more work in the beginning to get it set up, because there is substantially more sophisticated technology involved But once you've got it setup, it can usually just run itself and so as soon as a product is marked as having sold another one, in the database the stock level will go down by one, so the next time somebody pulls up the description for that particular product they’ll see this one less in stock because the information will come directly out of the database. Now there are a great many types of databases in world, and there is even a larger number of ways that you can connect them to your website. So I’m not going to show you any particular technologies involved here. I will just show you one example of a website that is doing exactly that. This is the uBid auction site and I’ve just drilled down now to the video section and in the video section, you can see there is a great number of video products on offer, these are all coming directly out of the database. Each one of these and there is quite a lot of them. There is a little database section called LCD Plasma TVs and there's well 6,7, 8 of those. So, I could click on one and pull up all the details of that one and here are all the details. All of this information, the current maximum bid, the quantity available, the incremental bid, the closing date for the auction and so forth, even the picture. All of this information is being pulled directly out of uBid's database. They must have a massive database with one entry for each product they’re selling. A site like this would simply not be possible without that kind of database connectivity technology employed in their website. Incidentally this happens to be using Microsoft's ASP technology as you can see.