The HealthCheck sample app that we've been playing with since Chapter 1, Getting Ready, is working fine, yet it lacks some important features we would likely make use of in a typical web application; among the most important of them is the ability to read and write data from a Database Management System (DBMS) since it is an essential requirement for almost any web-related task: content management, knowledge sharing, instant communication, data storage and/or mining, tracking and statistics, user authentication, system logging, and so on.
Truth be told, even our HealthCheck app could definitely use some of these tasks: tracking the host statuses over time could be a nice feature; user authentication should ...