Adobe Dreamweaver CC 2015 - Manual (Page 545)

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Dynamic sites, pages and web forms
Last updated 6/3/2015
Web application terminology
This section defines frequently used terms relating to web applications.
An application server Software that helps a web server process web pages containing server-side scripts or tags. When
such a page is requested from the server, the web server hands the page off to the application server for processing
before sending the page to the browser. For more information, see .
Common application servers include ColdFusion and PHP.
A database A collection of data stored in tables. Each row of a table constitutes one record and each column constitutes
a field in the record, as shown in the following example:
A database driver Software that acts as an interpreter between a web application and a database. Data in a database is
stored in a proprietary format. A database driver lets the web application read and manipulate data that would
otherwise be undecipherable.
A database management system (DBMS, or database system) Software used to create and manipulate databases.
Common database systems include Microsoft Access, Oracle 9i, and MySQL.
A database query The operation that extracts a recordset from a database. A query consists of search criteria expressed
in a database language called SQL. For example, the query can specify that only certain columns or only certain records
be included in the recordset.
A dynamic page A web page customized by an application server before the page is sent to a browser.
A recordset A set of data extracted from one or more tables in a database, as in the following example:
A relational database A database containing more than one table, with the tables sharing data. The following database
is relational because two tables share the DepartmentID column.