Appaserver^® is an application server that allows you to build commercial-quality, multi-user database applications quickly and completely. Running on any UNIX^®-flavored operating system, including Linux ^®, Appaserver couples Oracle ^® or MySQL with your browser.

Appaserver's forte is to build database applications without painting or programming screens! Once you've conceptualized your database, simply add the elements — tables, columns, relations, and roles — to the Appaserver engine, then log in.

Web forms are created dynamically, allowing you to select, insert, update, and delete everything in your database. But this is only the tip:

• Top/bottom, one-to-many screens are automatically produced.
• Query screens are automatically produced.
• With a push of a button you can compute statistics on numeric fields. (e.g., avg, min, max, standard deviation, etc.)
• With a push of a button you can create time charts and histograms on numeric fields.
• Relations are maintained from within.
  • You can update primary keys. Then the update cascades throughout the foreign keys across related tables.
  • You can delete rows without creating orphans.
  • Surrogate keys are no longer necessary! And because they are not natural to real-world phenomena, they are undesirable anyway. Instead of surrogate keys, Appaserver uses the table's natural key.

    Every relational database book teaches you to use surrogate keys. Relational databases have a serious restriction for primary keys — they cannot change. So, even using an obviously static key, like social security number, causes problems because it is too common to make an entry error. Appaserver overcomes the primary key restriction by having changes cascade throughout the foreign keys across related tables. Therefore, primary keys can be defined according to the attributes of the real-world: primary keys are the fewest columns that uniquely identify a single row. For the PERSON table, the primary keys would be first_name, middle_name, last_name, and (possibly) street_address or phone number. Then, if the person moves or gets married, Appaserver will update all the transaction records (and everything else) automatically.

Appaserver is flexible. Because ideas inspire ideas, Appaserver was designed for expansion. New elements are easily added to the engine, and residual elements are easily removed.

Appaserver is secure. You group users into roles, and then provide table-level — select, insert, update, and delete — access to each role. However, table-level access may be insufficient; therefore, row-level and column-level access can further be restricted. Also, Appaserver supports the Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

After building your database, you need to write the processes that do your customer's work. To help you, Appaserver comes with a rich set of libraries from which you can build upon. Alternatively, any process using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) will seamlessly migrate.

For a technical overview, view the Appaserver Database Schema.

Appaserver is freely available under the GNU software license, and free (limited) support is available. The ftp download site is here. For more information, please contact Tim Riley.

There's no better way to learn about Appaserver than to take a test drive.