COMP3311 09s1 Documentation
 Database Systems

The following documentation provides local (CSE) access to a collection of standard reference documentation on systems useful for COMP3311 assignments. It is not necessary to read these like a book; just dip into them when you need help on how to do something.

Each of these systems has plenty of other documentation available on-line. However, it's all outside CSE and reading it will cost you Internet quota.

PostgreSQL 8.3.5 The PostgreSQL open-source object-relational database management system.
PHP 5.2.8 The PHP web scripting language.
HTML 4.0.1 Language for describing contents of Web pages. Provides facilities for specifying layout, content-type and interactive elements to collect information from users.
CSS 2 Language for describing appearance of Web pages. Provides facilities for specifying visual characteristics of HTML elements (i.e. how the browser should display them).
Apache 1.3 Server for accepting and processing HTTP requests. Also allows for invocation of server-side scripts in languages such as PHP. Typically returns an HTML document to a user.
JavaScript Language for client-side scripting. Has become extremely fashionable over the last five years as a language for programming highly interactive apps within web browsers. Also, provides the basis for asynchronous access to databases from web pages (i.e. Ajax). There are many online tutorials for JavaScript. Since we're not using it for anything significant, you can probably work out enough from the examples in the lectures and in the Assignment 3 skeleton. The side link is to a 1.2MB PDF file containing the ECMAScript standard (ECMAScript is the old name for JavaScript).