Web based solution for team with no Server or database

Question

My team which is a part of a university needs me to develop a web based application for them which can be accessed by any team member. However the university doesn't provide us with a database.

We do have a portion in their server but that's for our public website. Even if I put the application on that server, I need to have a database. I can't use an excel sheet for storing all the data cause it will be huge. I am looking for an optimal solution.

Answer 1

Choose:

http://www.sqlite.org/
http://www.db4o.com/

Both will give you a database ability with no prior machine configuration or setup package.

Answer 2

Never fear there are a number of non RDBMS (Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL Server, etc.) solutions around.

You can try many of the document databases under No-SQL banner, with some popular options being:

• RavenDB if you are developing your web application in the Microsoft stack.
• MongoDB is a great well supported open source document database.
• BaseX or Sedna are useful XML databases.

Alternately you can look to Cloud (some offer free services, others are commercial and will need to pay for) databases such as:

• Amazon RDS
• Elasticsearch
• Windows Azure

Answer 3

For a small team group, specially with no more than 3 developers, I would recommend you to look at CloudBees. They offer a free tier where you can have on the same platform a repository, a Continuous Integration tool, so you can build and test your app every time you do a commit, and a runtime environment where you can deploy a Java, a Play or a PHP application. You can also create free databases.

In the case you wanted to have a visual git repository, you can use GitHub and link your source code with your Jenkins job.

In this way, you don't need multiple tools for your development environment.