Enterprises are increasingly being called upon to provide a high level of user experience with compelling and interactive content. Serving enterprise content and data securely to internet / intranet has become a very common necessity and is routinely handled by web servers. Web services technology, on the other hand, addresses the application-to-application transparent interaction over the web using industry standards. Delivery of web services can also be handled by databases which are responsive to HTTP requests. In this article a simple example of serving a static web page containing dynamic content from a SQL Anywhere 11 database server is described. The web page has examples of jQuery, DOJO, as well as an embedded ADOBE flash file.

Web servers and database web servers
Web servers enable enterprises to expose their data and information to intranet and internet users. This procedure involves nothing more than the client sending an HTTP request to the web server. The web server sends out any data processing in the request to backend server(s), formats the returned information in HTML, and serves the HTTP response to the user (Figure 1). In the case of static HTML content, the requested HTML files containing resources (images, videos, etc) will be returned to the user as an HTML response. For delivering streaming media, the content is delivered to the user via a browser plug-in accessing a streaming media server for maximum efficiency. Although, a standard web server can also be configured to serve streaming media files. AJAX has become popular where a partial refresh of a web page is needed. In this case, the web server is accessed via a XMLHTTP request with the response returning in XML \ HTML.

A basic request / response pair that connects a web browser with a web server is shown in Figure 1. Although an internet cloud is shown, the browser and the server can also be on the same computer.