Pain-Relieved Application Development

Big Headache

Web development has always been hobbled by the fact that the scripts which generate dynamic web pages contain a mixture of HTML page layout with server-side programming code. Page designers and programmers must share access to the same files, while trying not to step on each other's big feet.

The designer uses drag-and-drop page layout tools that may expose the code as unsightly blocks of text or, worse, may scramble the code when the page layout is changed. The programmer spends extra time on each page, manually integrating database code with the tool-generated HTML. After a site is launched, changes to the page layout might require the programmer's assistance. Replacing a whole page during full site updates may require re-programming from scratch!

Various brands of server pages have been devised to address the problem, all with some degree of success, all ultimately falling short.

Big Headache Solved

We do things differently. Your HTML documents are kept 100% separate from the program code. The page layouts remain as the designer left them, fully editable and viewable as HTML and containing only content and markup, no server-side script. Invisible tag attributes may be added to one or more HTML tags to delimit control structures (loops and conditionals), which may be nested to any depth, while adding neither complexity nor visible artifacts to the page layout.

The server scripts parse the HTML files into memory, cache them for repeated delivery, and serve them upon request while performing data insertion on the fly. Native web technology is used exclusively - pure .NET on .NET sites, pure Java on Java sites, etc. Performance matches or exceeds what is obtainable with traditional server pages. Security is enhanced through the elimination, at the architectural level, of any opportunity for cross-site scripting.

It's also worth noting that this integration method works with any style of markup, including WML, email, and XML/XSLT. In fact, the programming that serves a regular web page can be re-purposed to serve multiple languages, rich emails or Section 508 compliant pages with no changes.

The result is faster, more robust development, painlessly maintainable sites, happier collaboration.

This style of development is now recommended for new sites developed in ASP.NET or Java: for ASP.NET it is offered as an enhancement to 'code-behind'; for Java development it is recommended as an alternative to JSP in the presentation layer.