I guess every developer was asked at some point about making a website for a friend only to be taken aback by the technological limitations of the hosting provider.
I am a professional Asp.Net developer (of course I am versed also in winforms and all the other areas of .Net programming, but web applications are my specialty) and I am accustomed to work in relation with databases. When someone wants a website that normally requires at least a few tables and there is no database engine available, what do you do? Over the years I used two techniques: use xml based storage and javascript storage. Of course they are limited but the whole point is that for small scale applications they are sufficient. Here are some examples:
- http://www.orionmodels.ro : this is a javascript storage based application. It comprises of classic HTML, asynchronous loading using XMLHttpRequest and a script containing object definition and object instances (the models are actually javascript objects that are instanciated and then processed in the various pages of the application)
- http://www.mcmserv.ro: this is an xml storage based application. It is written in ASP.Net 2.0 and all the objects are serialized in xml on the web server. Pretty nifty and also has an html editor which saves html in the actual xml serialization (unfortunately that is on the administration side which is not available to outside)
Overall I am pleased with the results but it’s a technical trick and not something I endorse. Buy the heck a subscription with a database, normally it’s just a few dollars more.
P.S. Don’t mind the website’s design, I am not a designer … only a developer.
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