First Guide to SQL Anywhere Studio
PART 2. Getting Results with SQL Anywhere Studio
CHAPTER 10. Building a Dynamic Web Site with PowerDynamo
This section discusses some concepts that are useful for understanding how PowerDynamo works as an application server in an Adaptive Server Anywhere environment.
A glance at PowerDynamoPowerDynamo is a client application that acts as a middle-application server, handling all connections to Adaptive Server Anywhere through the ODBC interface and providing the application logic.
PowerDynamo includes Web site management features and, mobile Intranet capabilities. The Web site management utilities provide easy management of all aspects of Dynamic Web sites:
Authoring through Sybase Central.
Site management through Sybase Central.
Application Servers for deployment on a Web site managed by a Web server other than the Personal Web Server.
A Personal Web Server for offline access to data and Web documents, as well as for developing Web site content.
For information on using PowerDynamo's mobile Intranet features see the PowerDynamo User's Guide.
With PowerDynamo you can embed instructions into any document, and have the output displayed with the documents static HTML. At the core of PowerDynamo is an interpreter which processes specially tagged instructions embedded in the HTML pages or other documents, and servers the resulting output together with static HTML to the Web browser. PowerDynamo supports the following kinds of embedded instructions:
Tags you can embed SQL statements and manipulate returned data within a document with HTML tags and Dynamo's own tags.
SQL Statements you can place up-to-date database query results into a Web page when it is requested with SQL statements.
Scripts you can include programmatic control (conditional execution, looping and so on) in your Web pages with DynaScript and JavaScript.
JavaScript vs DynaScript For further information on the DynaScript scripting language see the PowerDynamo User's Guide. |
Text replacement and host variable macros you can respond to HTML forms and other variables supplied by a Web client.
Beyond HTML: Dynamic contentOrdinary Web sites consist of static HTML files. HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the language with which World Wide Web text documents are formatted. It defines the basic details of a document such as paragraph tags, graphics, and hypertext links. HTML files typically end with .html or .htm.
The documents that make up a PowerDynamo Web site are called scripts, which end in .ssc, and templates, which end in .stm. These documents work quite a bit differently than the standard HTML document. Templates and scripts can include anything from static HTML to dynamic HTML with embedded scripts and SQL queries. During the (server side) processing of these documents, the results are generated and all output is converted to HTML for display purposes. The document, containing only HTML at this point, is then served to the browser.