Our web application now can generate poems and display them to users, but it has no way of remembering poems that were created in the past. To do this, we need to add a persistence layer to our application. There are several ways we might be able to do this. One way would be to save each poem that is created as a file on the filesystem. This might work well for a little bit, but once there are a lot of poems it might be hard to keep track of them, and it might take a while to open every file to gather the data from each poem to display back to a user.
Luckily, there are a lot of systems out there that handle these concerns for us, and provide scalable ways to store and retrieve large amounts of information. One of the most popular types of these systems in web application development are relational databases, or more commonly just referred to as databases. These are different from the databases you might have learned about in library school like Web of Science!