4.3. What Else?
Armed with some knowledge of PL/SQL and HTML, you are ready to start building your own web-based applications. I hope that I have demystified some of the obstacles you may confront in your own projects and provided a solid foundation on which to expand your knowledge.
One area that I have not addressed at all is the testing of web-based PL/SQL applications. Although it may be possible to perform quite a bit of testing using a pure PL/SQL approach (see, for example, the discussion of Oracle's built-in package UTL_HTTP in Chapter 8), other freely available tools are probably a better fit. I won't go into the subject here, but I've recorded some of my thoughts on the subject, including some test scripts for the add_book form, at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnoracle.
This chapter has considered only a small part of the library application: populating (by hand) the catalog with a new book. I ignored fundamental tasks such as querying or modifying the catalog, or fetching catalog information from other sources. In the chapters ahead, I'll present solutions to some of these additional challenges.