The browser has become an extremely powerful, yet simple method of providing the user interface, since it handles the network considerations and allows you to create rich user interfaces through simple scripting, HTML and style sheets.

Your database considerations can be taken care of simply through the use of SQLServer or the Microsoft Jet Engine, and your business logic - the guts of your application that processes the data from the database and sends it to the browser - can be simple ASP pages (enhanced with ActiveX controls if the fancy takes you).

Once you have the basics of ASP, HTML and VBScript the business logic and user interface are taken care of quickly and simply - but how do you use ASP to access your database and hence complete your 3-tier application? Read on...

Simple database Access using ADO and ASP

For this example we'll use Access .mdb databases - but we could just as easily use SQLServer by changing a single line (and of course, configuring the databases correctly). We'll be assuming your application is ASP based running on Microsoft's IIS Webserver.

We use ADO since it is portable, widespread, and very, very simple.

The Connection

To access a database we first need to open a connection to it, which involves creating an ADO Connection object. We then specify the connection string and call the Connection object's Open method.

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