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NEW@ 14/05/01 8:17 PM Page 8

MAY TUTOR ■
ONLINE DATABASES

online
databases
S ev e ral new Web services give you the tools to assemble online forms and the back-
end support to host and analyse the data. In this Tutor we take a look at the pos-
sibilities and pinpoint four services that can make a diffe re n ce .

hatever the size or the purpose of

W your Internet venture, gathering

information from users and inte-
grating that feedback with your
back-end systems has always been a hassle.
You want to post easy-to-use fill-in forms on
your site, and you want to tabulate user
responses quickly and easily. All of these
tasks require databases, and databases aren’t
that easy to deploy.
The problem with handling database tasks
on the Web is building the interaction. A
database by itself isn’t worth very much; what
makes it valuable is the two-way information
stream it provides. First, you and your users
can make queries against the data in order to
yield meaningful results. Second, users (with
the proper permissions) can add to the data-
base by creating and editing records or by fill-
ing in forms.
In both cases, creating the Web interface for
the database requires programming, or at
least a Web editor that will perform the pro-
gramming for you.
HTML forms are a good example. Although
they have always been simple enough to
design, making them do anything useful
required programming, which typically meant
using Perl to create CGI programs in the Web
document that would accept and return data.

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Tutor.MAY...NEW@ 14/05/01 8:17 PM Page 9
Figure 1: FormSite.com offers enough sample forms and fields to suit most busi-
ness needs. Here, a customer survey form invites feedback from site visitors.
And making the CGI program interact with
your database application required more
extensive programming.
In the past couple of years, the need for
programming has been reduced to a degree
by HTML editing programs (such as Micro-
soft FrontPage) and other packages designed
to make form creation easier, but form pro-
gramming remains a difficult part of Web
design. Even if you use FrontPage, you enjoy
full database integration only through Win-
dows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 systems run-
ning Microsoft Internet Information Ser-
vices. If you’re leasing space from a Web
hosting service that’s running, say, Linux
servers, you’ll probably have to do at least
some programming for your database inter-
actions anyway.
None of this is a problem, of course, if you
have the money and time for specialists to
design your forms. But if you have neither,
or if you have no inclination to get into even
rudimentary programming, your chances of
being able to put up an HTML database appli-
cation have been quite remote. Until now.
New Web services let you create online
databases and forms. The three early entries
into the Web database category are Active-
space (www.activespace.com), Bitlocker
(www.bitlocker.com) and FormSite.com. The
sites offer free versions, and some have
upgraded, for-pay versions as well. In all
cases, trying the free service will give you a
strong sense of whether you’ll need the addi-
tional features of the pay version. We’ll look
here at some of the ways in which these ser-
vices can help you and your business.
AVOID FORM PROGRAMMING
FormSite.com lets you design and mount a
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ONLINE DATABASES
Figure 2: Bitlocker offers wizards that step you through the process of import-
ing pre-existing databases for online sharing.
fill-in form on your Web site. The service
will also host the form, and you simply pro-
vide a link to the form from your Web site
(and a link back, of course). Because forms
aren’t hard to design when you’re using
HTML editors, the important part of this ser-
vice is the hosting. FormSite.com takes care
of the interaction between the scripts and
the Web server, which is the biggest obstacle
to making forms work.
The free service limits you to a maximum
of five forms and 30 items on each form. The
downside is that all your forms will show
advertising. For $49.95 per year, the Deluxe
service gives you 1,000 results per form, 30
forms, 100 items per form and 1,000 form sub-
missions per month. There are also three
Professional plans, ranging from $199.95 to
$499.95 per year, that increase these numbers
and add password protected forms, SSL secu-
rity and advertising-free forms. We’ll look at
the free version.
You can design forms from scratch or
choose templates to speed up the process. In
FormSite.com’s case, the template feature is
somewhat unusual. Only a few templates
are available, and they’re too generic to be
very useful. Furthermore, they’re not really
samples to work from; they’re elements to
include in forms you’re designing on your
own. These templates provide typical fields
and feedback elements for such things as
product orders, registration, customer sur-
veys, interview feedback and guest books.
But the bulk of the form is up to you.
The trick to making a useful form with
FormSite.com is to experiment. Starting with
a template, even if you end up changing all
of it, lets you see the possibilities and learn
the interface (which takes a bit of getting
■ MAY TUTOR
used to). Anything you do can be changed,
and you can add new fields even when the
form is already published. In fact, it’s pub-
lished as soon as you click the first Submit
button. The form is sent to a directory on
FormSite.com that you designate.
The types of fields available are limited,
but there are certainly enough for most
form uses. You can employ radio buttons,
check boxes, drop-down lists, text fields,
text boxes and option fields such as Yes/No,
True/False and Easy/Difficult. FormSite.com
also provides value fields, such as Age,
Education, state of residence and Marital
Status, that are easily readable for reports
based on your forms.
You can edit elements on your forms by
selecting the item from the Form Items box
and clicking the Update button. Once your
form is on the Web and accessible by others,
the data collected is presented in two Public
Results URLs for that form. You can link to the
results pages to let users access them, or you
can keep the data yourself. The first URL lays
out the number of responses for each possi-
ble field value, the percentage of the total for
each response and a bar graph beside each
value to give you a graphical data format. The
second URL shows the results in a sortable
table. FormSite.com will email form results to
you, if you ask, and the service can send an
automatic email response to each user who
completes your form.
SHARING YOUR DATABASES
Creating and hosting forms are essential ser-
vices, of course, but two companies take
online databases several steps further. Active-
space and Bitlocker let you create and mount
a wide variety of database types for sharing
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ONLINE DATABASES

among colleagues, friends or the Web pub-
lic in general. Both services offer pre-designed
business related, home related and education
related databases you can install and cus-
tomise; you can also build databases from
scratch. You can produce Web-based forms
using these services, but FormSite.com tends
to be easier to use for this specific function.
We’ll take a look at Bitlocker, the more
established of the two services (as of this
writing, Activespace was still in beta). We
highly recommend that you try both, though,
because although they’re similar in function,
their strengths and interfaces are significant-
ly different. Bitlocker’s free service gives you
25MB of space, with banner ads appearing on
your pages. The paid version ($99 per year)
bumps you up to 100MB of space and gets
rid of the ads. Activespace’s Web-site FAQ
indicated that pricing would be determined
once the full product launches. For now, the
service is free.
Bitlocker’s business templates include an
advertising schedule, a customer feedback
tracker, an event planner, a product regis-
tration form, an employee evaluation form
and a job application tracker. For home users,
databases can keep track of movie libraries,
school activities, wine cellars, gift lists and
wedding plans. Each database has an asso-
ciated sample and template. You can work
directly from either.
These databases are useful by themselves,
but the real point is that your database
becomes available to other users over the
Web. All of your sales and customer service
reps can contribute to the customer feed-
back and sales-lead databases, for example,
and all managers can add information to the
employee evaluation forms. You can make
your database public, as you would in the
case of an openly available Web form, or
you can restrict access in a variety of ways.
You can establish workgroups to collabo-
rate on databases, and you can invite people
into the workgroup via email or by search-
ing the Bitlocker user base.
Creating and modifying a database takes
getting used to, but Bitlocker’s interface is the
most straightforward of the services. None of
the database examples is particularly com-
plex, and that’s worth keeping in mind when
you create new ones. Databases need not be
complex to be effective. In fact, the more
complex a database is, the more difficulty
contributors will have adding records. Still,
you can add as many fields as you need to
make your database function according to
your needs. You can also import data from
existing databases and include calculated
fields in your Bitlocker databases.
Databases serve many functions. Online
databases can increase functionality in spe-
cific ways, particularly with their ability to let
others contribute. FormSite.com, Activespace
and Bitlocker let you work with online data-
bases without your own database servers or
extensive Web programming, and that is an
obvious advantage.

QUICKBASE
As this article was about to go to press,
Quicken publisher Intuit entered the online
database service market with QuickBase
(www.quickbase.com). As with its siblings,
Quicken and QuickBooks, QuickBase is
easy to use and capable of handling sur-
prisingly complex tasks. The service is well
worth examining, and will please many
users with its clean design and the equal-
ly clean multiple database views it cre-
ates.
The free service limits you to three data-
bases, 3MB of storage and 100MB per
month of data transfer. $14.95 per month
ups the ante to 15 databases, 15MB of stor-
age and 1GB of data transfer. $49.95 a
month, the premium plan, raises the data-
base and storage numbers to 50 and
100MB, respectively, keeping the 1GB trans-
fer limit.
The two paid plans provide Application
Programming Interface (API) support and
let you create form-based email pages.
The service’s plan is to make APIs available
for Java, Perl and VBA so developers can
embed the service into their own Web
sites. The developer area of the QuickBase
service is at http://d ev e l o p e r. q u i ck-
base.com/quickbase. You can develop
applications for QuickBase itself or for
QuickBooks Site Builder through a cata- users to view or collaborate on the data-
logue of sample code. base.
QuickBase also offers several sample The ease of use, features and develop-
databases to help you learn about the ser- ment capabilities of QuickBase make for an
vice. To use a sample, you copy it to your extremely compelling service.
personal QuickBase area and edit it. Some
useful samples include the Event-Attendee
Manager and the Fundraising Manager. All
QuickBase databases provide several dif-
ferent views of the data. Sifting through the
samples demonstrates some of the fea-
tures you can include in your databases.
Database templates include a sales-
pipeline tracker, a workgroups-issues track-
er, a personnel database, a hiring requi-
sitions database and a group bibliogra-
phy. You can create or modify fields, set the
report layout, and of course, add new
records.
As you’d expect, you can also share your
databases. You tell QuickBase whether
you want your database to be fully public
or fully restricted. If you choose the latter,
you can use the Share menu item in Quick-
Base to grant access to specific users. You
can specify each user’s access rights, as
well – read only or read/write. You can also
limit users’ access to the records they cre- Figure 3: QuickBase lets you maintain detailed
employee files and have other managers pro-
ate, or allow them free rein across the vide input from wherever they may be.
entire database. An email system invites

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