Database Sockets and Web Application Development: Papers and Presentations

Patrick M. Benson originated database sockets, enabling enterprise-scale and e-commerce capable web systems. In the mid-1990’s he gave four national presentations and presented two papers detailing how n-tier web systems could be built and the role database sockets played. These became part of the web developer's toolbox. This collection pulls together for the first time all six documents. It includes contemporaneous speaker notes, updates to the papers and presentations notes reflecting questions and answers at the conferences, and update comments from June 2012. Included are: • "Perl as a System Glue" from the First O'Reilly Perl Conference. The paper and presentation are the genesis of database sockets and distributed computing in UNIX and related open source tools. • "OASIS – A Web Based Fixed Assets System" from the Indiana University 1998 WebDevShare conference. The paper and presentation that provided the first deep technical details describing how database sockets worked. It includes the C-code necessary to implement server side database sockets. • "OASIS – A Web Based Fixed Assets System" from the 1998 EduComm/EduCause national conference. Here Benson provided a management view into sample systems and web development and activities. This includes Benson's Best Practices model • "Performance Driven Design Issues in Web Development" from the 1999 WebDevShare conference. This presentation addressed challents of moving web systems from development into production. Here Benson introduced both real-world n-tier, multiport and multithread sockets as a solution to issues faced by web developers.