Datasheet

The DataWeb Development Environment

• Drag and drop design: Move columns and other objects by simply dragging and dropping inside the Builder.



• Pull-down menus: The DataWeb Builder features convenient drop-down menus, giving you easy access to all major functionality.



• Template pages: Display your views in template pages, which provide a navigation menu and a set of styles to unify your application. A single template can contain multiple regions that can be displayed or hidden in multiple views.



• Multiple design modes: Data table designer for building and modifying data tables, adding data events, and previewing data. View designer for graphically creating and modifying pages. Source editor with statement completion, automatic syntax checking, and indenting.



• Porting: DataWeb can crawl an existing web site, import pages, and fix up links within the pages. This gives a quick start on porting web sites to the DataWeb Platform.



• FTP: The Platform includes a custom FTP server that integrates with the DataWeb security model. This allows developers to publish content to DataWeb application from existing web development tools, including HomeSite and Dreamweaver.



• Component library: Load reusable components from the Application Gallery or build your own. Components include a Simple Content Manager; Wireless Access Wizard; Scheduler; Calendar; Contact Manager; Full Text Search; Document Library; Discussion Board.

• Table generation: DataWeb can create a new data table in one of four ways.
  - Use the DataWeb Builder to build a table's schema.
  - Import a text file.
  - Import an Excel worksheet.
  - Import an Access database.
  
  
• Table editing and display: DataWeb provides a graphical editor for editing data-table schema and for displaying the data stored in the table.
  
  
• Joins and relationships: Create joins and relationships without writing any SQL. DataWeb's data-web integration automatically creates the database functionality behind your pages.

• Data types: The DataWeb Server supports common database data types, including new web types like HTML, File Attachment, and URL.

• Import all of the tables and data
• Maintain each table's primary key
• Maintain field data types
• Import relationships and automatically create lookup fields
• Import table and field captions and descriptions

• Excel
• Text files in CSV format
• XML

• Export all data tables to an Access database
• Export an individual data table to a comma-delimited text file.
• Export a snapshot of the application and the current data to a web archive.

• Flexible editing: The Builder has both a graphical editing tool that allows a developer to author views through the UI, and an editable source view, for direct editing.



• Script integration: Script can be used anywhere within a view to calculate and output values. In addition, script expressions can be used within many attributes on the server, to change how a page is rendered.



• Template pages: Template pages are an innovative way to give a group of pages within an application a common navigation "frame" and formatting. A template contains some navigation elements, a style-sheet link, and an area where different views can be displayed. Every 'view' file in a DataWeb web can use a template. If you've specified that a particular view should use a template, then the view appears nested inside the template's framework when the view is displayed in the browser.



• Data regions: Data regions are areas of a page bound to data. Data regions support filtering, sorting, and paging through data. Data regions can display data in grid, insert, update or details modes. Multiple modes allow a developer to create a single page and use it to serve different types of uses.



• Auto joins: Views can include data from multiple tables without exposing SQL or the concepts of joins. Users can add related fields to the display of any record and can also display "sub-lists" of related information.

• Secure logon: All logons to the DataWeb system occur over SSL connections. The logon is preserved over standard HTTP connections and reauthorized via HTTPs at regular intervals.



• Security and individual pages: Any element of a page can be displayed or hidden, or editable or non-editable, based on user permissions.



• Record-level security: The Author role allows groups of users to create records but limits their update privileges to the records they created.

• Owner: The Owner role is always assigned to the Owner group and can't be changed. The web owner can perform any operation on the web.



• Administrator: The Administrators group is assigned one and only one role, the Administrator role. The Administrator role confers on the Administrators group the ability to perform any operation on the web except for changing the owner.



• Manager: The Manager role confers on a group the ability to set security (meaning that they can assign folder-level permissions), design tables and views, and create, edit, and delete records. The Staff group, and the Members group can have the Manager role.



• Designer: Designers can design tables and views and create, edit, and delete records. The Staff group, and the Members group can have the Designer role.



• Editor: Editors can create, edit, and delete records. The Staff group, the Members group, and the Guests group can have the Editor role.



• Author: An author can create new records and can edit or delete a record where the value of the OwnedBy field is the author's user name. The Staff group, the Members group, the Guests group, and the Anonymous group can have the Author role.



• Depositor: Depositors can create records but not view, edit, or delete records. The Staff, Members, Guests and Anonymous groups can have the Depositor role.



• Reader: Readers can read existing records as well as browse the files of a web, but they can't create new records or edit or delete existing records. The Staff group, the Members group, the Guests group, and the Anonymous group can have the Reader role.



• Data reader: Data Readers can read records but not browse the files of a web or create, edit, or delete records. Staff, Members, Guests and Anonymous groups can have the Reader role.



• No access: The No Access role prevents a group from accessing the web or folder in any way. Any group except the owner and Administrators group can be assigned this role.

• Data events: Developers can write script that runs in response to actions on a table, including insert, update, and delete actions.



• Server-side scripting: DataWeb's JavaScript implementation lets developers create business logic to drive an application, generate custom pages based on user requests, or programmatically manipulate data tables.



• Web Services: The HTTP client objects offer programmatic access to the data returned by a request to any web server. These objects make it possible to share data between a DataWeb web application and any other web site or web service.

• Data+Web object model: The object model includes standard JavaScript objects, data access objects similar to JDBC, and custom DataWeb objects for creating custom application logic.



• HTTP object model: The HTTP client objects offer programmatic access to the data returned by a request to any web server. These objects make it possible to share data between a DataWeb web application and any other web site on the Internet.



• Web schema object model: Web schema objects offer programmatic access to the structure of your web application and tables. You can create and modify tables, fields, and indexes.

• DataWeb JavaScript executes at the web server, not in the client web browser. It provides access to web server objects such as http requests and responses, database objects such as tables and result sets, and web services objects such as XML streams and the XML document object model. Because it runs at the server, DataWeb Script does not access client-side objects such as browsers or HTML documents. To manipulate these objects use client-side JavaScript.



• DataWeb JavaScript is case-insensitive.



• DataWeb JavaScript supports block scoping. Block scoping enables you to declare local variables that are not available to code outside the block.



• DataWeb JavaScript does not support automatic semi-colon insertion, automatic declaration of variables, do/while loops or regular expressions.

• Web servers: DataWeb runs on IIS and Windows 2000.



• Database servers: The database servers run Microsoft SQL server 2000.



• Load balancers: The DataWeb data center uses F5 big IP load balancers.



• Auxiliary servers: Mail gateways and DNS servers run Unix/Linux.

• Scalability on demand: DataWeb supports clustering with multiple web-servers running identical copies of the DataWeb software. Each server can service requests for any DataWeb application and additional web and database servers can be added at any time to handle additional load.



• C++ Runtime: The majority of the DataWeb runtime is implemented in C++, allowing for the highest level of optimization. There are no Java, ASP or COM components.



• Virtual database support: Each DataWeb application has its own custom tables and schema, but many applications can share a single physical database. This lowers the overhead for each app and allows the back-end to service many virtual databases efficiently. The DataWeb security layer guarantees that users read and update tables only if they have appropriate permissions.



• Data caching layer: In typical web applications many queries are repetitive, and the results of those queries change infrequently. The DataWeb data layer caches common query results and invalidates cached results as updates occur. The data-caching layer also includes a database connection pool to optimize the use of database resources when SQL queries are necessary.



• View and script caching: Compiled views and scripts are cached on web servers to speed request handling. Security and reliability



• Secure systems: Industry-standard implementation based on state of the art secure Microsoft technology.



• Secure facility: Staffed, secure, guarded hosting facility.



• Data backups: Transaction logs backed up to tape every 30 minutes. Incremental daily data backups to tape. Weekly full data backups to tape.



• Archiving: DataWeb can package an entire application as a zip file for easy archiving, maintenance and restoration.