Introduction
Database hosts data in a very organized way, which
makes data more accessible. So it's good to have your
database stored in a database. But usually database
costs much money to have and more time to development.
Background
Nenest comes up a new online service, which enables
users to create online database easily and productively.
Basically there are 3 ways to create online databases:
Importing an existing database- Your data are automatically
imported to your online database, and an online form
is created for display.
Defining database schema- This is a developer's way
to create database, because they know database. Also
there are lots of high-level field types available
to specify table columns, such as email, picture,
hyperlink, phone number, documents, address, credit
card etc. When a database is created, an online form
associated is also created for display.
Creating an online form- If you know nothing about
database, or you just have a display form, this is
an easiest to create database. You use a WYSIWYG form
builder to create an online form (you could copy &
paste any form from the web), then a database associated
is automatically create in the back-end.
More importantly, it provides many nice Web APIs to
make it possible to integrate online database with
users' web site. There are 3 kinds of APIs:
HTML API
XML API
Query API
HTML APIs return HTML script with a CSS file controlling
the display. So you can directly insert those HTML
string in your web pages. And you can customize the
display by creating your own CSS file.
XML APIs return well-formatted data in XML, which
gives your highest flexibilities to render the data.
Query APIs return something like record count, and
record ID lists, with which you can call the HTML
and XML APIs