Huh? Atozed converted to ASP.NET??
Posted by in Miscellaneous, tags: .net, Delphi, IntraWebIs IntraWeb dead? Are they crazy at Atozed? Got Atozed assimilated by Microsoft? Won’t {Enter new Delphi company name here} be supported by Atozed?
To make it short: All questions can be answered with “no”. Hm, well I’m not
so sure about craziness – aren’t software developers crazy in general? 
As you might have seen already at
we just started porting our Website to ASP.NET/aspx. This will of course raise
the question:
Why doesn’t Atozed use IntraWeb for their own Website?
Building WebSites with IntraWeb is overkill. We could have used
IntraWeb’s Page mode (see below), which we discussed internally, but
then we would have done it perfect of course. We would have built a
database driven online Content Management System. I
know quite some customers of ours who are doing something similar with
IntraWeb. We already have an offline Content Management System as a
The Atozed Website is basically plain HTML plus some simple dynamic features.
Using IntraWeb for that would be possible and it’s in fact tempting to
do so, because we know it inside and out. As we already have our own
Content Management System, we decided to use that and ASP.NET for the few
dynamic parts we need. If we had the need for lots of dynamic content, then we
would have selected IntraWeb’s page mode of course.
For our online shop we are of
course using IntraWeb – even if you see an ASPX extension there as well. I’ll
explain that in the next article
Websites vs. Web applications
It’s very important to understand the differences to select the right tool.
Sometimes it’s not easy to tell if a certain sample is still a
Website or already a Web application, but you need to know the basic criterias.
Webites
A Website is a collection of Web pages. Every page contains some content, and
links to other pages in the same site, or to external sites. A Web page is
basically some HTML plus references to resources like images, flash animations
etc. Originally Web pages were done just by writing HTM code to a file.
Later some tools/programming languages were invented that produce HTML
as output (ASP, PHP, ASP.NET, WebSnap etc). These tools/languages were
invented to do display some more advanced content. One of the main
features of these languages is for example the possibility to pull content off a
database, and render it to HTML.
Dynamic pages
Dynamic pages are part of Web sites. They are used to display dynamic
content. Dynamic content is read from a database, it might depend on the
actual Web browser used. It might also display interactive content,
such as simple input controls, up to complex data entry forms etc. You can
create a simple dynamic page just by using plain HTML and maybe some
JavaScript, or you might use one of the advanced tools which make it more easy
to develop these “dynamic parts”.
Important is: dynamic pages are independent, i.e. you can link to
them, and they will display their content where ever it comes from. Dynamic
pages do not require a state. IntraWeb’s PageMode was designed exactly
around these requirents, see below.
Web applications
An application is something that has one or more execution paths. You
start an application, it will display a first form, where you can start
certain application functions. Depending on the function you have chosen
the application will show more forms. In other words: an application has a
state.
State
Simply put, a state defines “where am I” and “where am I allowed to go
to”. You might now say: ”Hey, my website works exactly like
that!” On the first view this is confusing, but the point is, that a
website always allows you to go to any page it contains, and even to open as
many forms/pages of it at the same time. You just need to copy and past the
URL’s to new browser instances. An application does not allow you to do
that. You can not start an application like Word for example, and have it
display the search and replace window as first form.
A state can even contain data, a lot of data. Think of open datasets/queries
for example. This data belongs to the user who is currently running the
application. There are many possible locations where this
state can be stored. In memory (of machine that runs the application),
in cookies, in a database etc. Storing “some” data (setting a cookie,
having a database behind), does not necessarily introduce a real state though,
but it might be one of many indications that you are looking at a Web
application and not at a Web site. The border between Web sites and
Web applications is blurred that is.
IntraWeb’s ApplicationMode was desined to handle stateful Web
applications.
IntraWeb Application Mode
As the name implies, this is primarily for developing Web applications. It
has all these powerful features you probably already know about. One of the
outstanding features is certainly the completely transparent state management.
You don’t have to care about the current user’s state. Its just there. Like in
“normal” Desktop applications.
IntraWeb Page Mode
This is for developing dynamic pages and Web sites. It provides a
very easy to use way to develop Web pages that pull their content of a database
for example. It allows you re-use all your Delphi skills (existing libraries
etc.). Unlike other tools you don’t even need to know about HTML, as you can
use IntraWeb’s unique form layout mode.
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