Dina Research School

Workshop: Databases and webprogramming

Tune Landboskole, 13-14 January 2005

Introduction

You have probably used the world wide web to find a phone number, to check a course schedule, to plan a trip by bus, train or car, to search for a protein similar to a given one, to buy a book or lab chemicals, or to book a holiday.

In all these cases you will have used web pages that were created dynamically by a script running on a web server, drawing data from a database.

This workshop teaches you how such web scripts work and how to write your own scripts using the PHP language. It also explains how to use the database query language SQL and the database server Mysql.

Why is this relevant for you? Probably your research leads you to collect some data, whether experimental data, taxonomic data, or information about individual organizations, animals, trees, fields, farms or other objects.

You will learn that relational databases can store, organize, query, tabulate and check your data far better than spreadsheets (Excel), text files, Word documents, or bundles of paper.
Maybe you want to make the findings and possibly the data of your research widely accessible and usable. The web is an obvious way to do this: dynamically created web pages can present the desired data or results derived from them.
Conversely, a web site backed by a database is an excellent way to collect data from several contributors (at the location and time that suits them).
If your work involves computational or mathematical models, then a dynamic web site is a way to make your research come alive in a way that it cannot in the text of an article or technical report.

All the tools you need are available for free.

The workshop will give you a lot of information in a short time through lectures, but we allocate also much time to practical computer exercises where you will create your own web scripts and databases.

You need no prior knowledge about programming or databases, but if you do have such prior experience you can get further in the computer exercises.

The workshop is aiming at Ph.D. students in the agricultural and biological sciences and Ph.D.-students with a background in mathematics, computer science or engineering, who are interested in learning more about the applications in the biological sciences.

The DINA Research School is part of a Nordic cooperation. The workshop language will be English unless all participants have Danish as the first language.

We are looking forward to seeing you at Tune Landboskole.

Author: phd@dina.kvl.dk. Updated: 21 november 2004