INFORMIX^®-Data Director^™

Version 1.0 for Web

Sophisticated Content Management
Rapid Application Prototyping and Development
Extendibility to Support Web Innovation
Best Integration with the Enterprise
INFORMIX-Data Director for Web Specifications

INFORMIX-Data Director^™ for Web is a powerful and visually intuitive development environment that enables developers to quickly prototype, build, manage, and deploy dynamic Web applications that are highly optimized for Informix Dynamic Server^™. Tightly integrated with the Informix Web Integration Option^™ for Informix Dynamic Server, Data Director for Web provides sophisticated project and content management capabilities that allow entire teams (whether local or remote) to collaborate on one or many development projects, simultaneously.

Data Director not only provides an easy-to-use, interface for rapid application development. It gives developers the flexibility to use a robust programming interface and wizard technology to customize and optimize their Web applications. With its integration with industry leading tools and technologies, Data Director ensures optimal integration with the enterprise, making it ideally suited for developing sophisticated Web applications that incorporate automated and dynamic Web Publishing and mission-critical transaction processing. With Data Director, organizations can truly begin managing the Web for business advantage.

Data Director for Web is specifically designed to support developers using Informix Dynamic Server with Web Integration Option. This integration allows Web developers to take full advantage of Informix's Dynamic Scalable Architecture^™ server technology to manage all their Web content and application logic together for increased manageability, security, and accuracy, while simultaneously creating applications that dynamically deliver customized information to the user.

Unlike other Web solutions, which store Web applications as flat files and scripts in the system file store, Informix-based Web application solutions enable organizations to store an entire Web application, including Web page templates and site content, in the Informix database. Informix Dynamic Server with Web Integration Option also enables organizations to manage and publish all the types of content that make the Web compelling: text, audio, images and video, spatial and time-series data, and more.

In an Informix-based Web content management system, content is delivered to the Web browser through the use of application pages—called "AppPages." These AppPages contain a set of HTML-compliant tags and attributes that are expanded at runtime into HTML documents. Using these tags to embed SQL expressions and statements directly into the AppPages, any form of database content can be dynamically incorporated into the HTML documents. You can also use programmatic capabilities such as variables and conditional statements to give even more run-time flexibility to your AppPages.

Figure 1: Screen Image, Data Director for Web (32Kb, GIF)

Sophisticated Content Management

Data Director for Web is the ideal development environment for building database enhanced applications. It offers a number of advanced features and functionality for rapid application prototyping and development of AppPages, and it provides a sophisticated Web site and content management system for creating and maintaining flexible, content-extensible Web applications.

INFORMIX-Data Director for Web provides a powerful and sophistic ated framework for creating and maintaining dynamic Web applications. A key feature of Data Director for Web is the Site Manager, which is used to manage and organize the Web-specific content stored within an Informix database, as well as handle extensible resources such as MIME multimedia types and user-defined tags.

Site Manager

The Site Manager allows developers to import content from existing file system-based Web sites, group content by projects and content types, and deploy from development to production databases. Data Director for Web's Site Manager displays a Windows Explorer-style visual representation of your Web site, through which you navigate the Web content and apply operations to organize the site.

Views. Within the Site Manager, developers can organize and view their Web content either by project or file type. The project view provides a logical grouping of content, which can be deployed together, locked as a group, and/or worked on by a team. The file view provides a hierarchical organization compatible with the file system hierarchy of file system-based Web sites. From either the project or file view, the developer is also presented with the resource list view that represents all available Web content resources—such as AppPages, images, objects, etc. Content resources can be easily moved among folders or projects simply by dragging and dropping, or cutting and pasting. You can also import content resources from external file sources, such as Windows Explorer.
Editing and Previewing Resources. Simply by double clicking or dragging and dropping, developers can invoke a resource editor to customize or change content. The specific resource editor used is dependent on that content's MIME type, and can be configured by the user. For example, double clicking on an image resource can launch the user's preferred image editor. Editing an AppPage invokes the AppPage Editor. Site Manager also gives you the ability to preview content resources within the Web browser of your choice.
Concurrency and Version Management. The Site Manager provides resource locking and version numbering to enable multiple developers to simultaneously work on the same Web site. Both individual resources and complete projects can be locked, depending on developer requirements.

Rapid Application Prototyping and Development

INFORMIX-Data Director for Web is a versatile product that enables developers to rapidly build and extend Web applications. A key feature of Data Director for Web is the AppPage Editor, which provides a simple, Windows-based, graphically enhanced interface for editing AppPages.

The AppPage Editor

The AppPage Editor makes the process of authoring and designing AppPages simple and efficient. It helps developers create and apply dynamic tags—reusable components that simplify the building of AppPages. It also provides a color—coded view of HTML source, dialogs for prompted editing of special tags, and several wizards to guide the user when generating queries and assembling forms linked to database content. With the AppPage Editor, developers can edit and enhance Web pages developed using other industry leading Web page development tools like Microsoft Front Page, Netscape Composer, HotDog by Sausage, and Allaire Cold Fusion.

Wizards. For more complex programming tasks, the AppPage Editor provides wizard technology to guide the developer through the AppPage tag creation process. For example, the query wizard takes you through the steps to create an SQL query and choose how its results will be formatted. These queries are defined by a series of easy to use dialog boxes. The input form wizard and the update form wizard are used to create HTML forms for inserting and updating database content. Most importantly, rather than inserting complex SQL sequences of tags directly into the AppPages, the AppPage wizards construct user—defined tags that encapsulate queries and SQL statements into reusable components that can be used in multiple instances and contexts by developers, even those with no database programming experience.
Dialogs. The AppPage Editor provides a number of dialogs to assist the developer, speeding commonly performed tasks. For example, when the developer inserts Web Integration Option tags—handling such commands as queries, variables, subroutines, error handling, and more—a dialog prompts the developer for the attributes and, where appropriate, the body of the tag to be inserted. The AppPage Editor also provides dialogs that assist the developer in constructing variable processing functions, by displaying a list of all available functions and parameters. When a function is selected, it is inserted into the AppPage along with the matching parameters.
Drag-and-Drop Interface. With Data Director for Web, all application resources can be inserted into your AppPages through a simple, easy-to-use drag-and-drop metaphor. In addition to the HTML source display, the site manager enables you to drag and drop available project resources into the desired location on the page.
Color-Coded HTML. The AppPage Editor makes it easy to edit HTML source by color-coding it in order to distinguish the different elements. In particular, this highlights the Web Integration Option's special tags, so you can easily identify and modify those tags. As changes are made, the color coding is dynamically updated.
Previewing Options. The AppPage Editor provides two options for previewing AppPages. One can preview the AppPage directly within the editor, simply by toggling to a preview window. Or you can choose to preview the AppPage from your external Web browser.
On-Line Help and Documentation. In addition to printed manuals, Data Director for Web provides a complete, context-sensitive on-line help and documentation facility.

Extendibility to Support Web Innovation

INFORMIX-Data Director for Web is designed to fully support application extendibility in a number of ways. It allows developers to integrate a broad range of datatypes to incorporate multimedia, geospatial analysis, text and document management, data mining, and other application capabilities. Data Director for Web also allows developers to work with additional third-party tools, such as Haht's Haht Site, Microsoft InterDev, Microsoft FrontPage, Netscape Composer, Sausage's HotDog, and Allaire Cold Fusion.

MIME Types

Using the Site Manager, you can easily make edits to the list of available MIME types—allowing applications to be extended to handle additional types of content resources. By selecting how to edit each type of resource, you can also integrate other tools into your development environment.

Figure 2: Screen Image, Data Director for Web (37Kb, GIF)

Application Programming Interface

If you need to store and manage custom Web content within the Informix database, Data Director for Web provides and application programming interface (API) in the form of a Visual C++ class library, allowing direct access to objects within the Data Director for Web database schema.

Best Integration with the Enterprise

INFORMIX-Data Director for Web is the ideal development environment for rapidly prototyping and building sophisticated Informix Dynamic Server-based Web applications. And it allows you to work with leading third-party tools. The result? Now you can fully exploit the Web's potential by quickly and easily deploying electronic-commerce, content management, transaction processing, Web site management, and Web publishing applications with a minimal learning curve. With INFORMIX-Data Director for Web, Web Integration Option, and Informix Dynamic Server, you can truly manage the Web for business advantage.