Apple WebObjects 5 - Manual (Page 13)

Dynamic HTML Publishing 13
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Apple Computer, Inc. January 2002
C H A P T E R 2
2 What Is WebObjects?
From an information technology perspective, WebObjects is a scalable,
high-availability, high-performance application server. From the viewpoint of a
developer, though, WebObjects is an extensible object-oriented platform upon
which you can rapidly develop and deploy Web applications that integrate existing
data and systems. WebObjects is especially suited to dynamically publishing data
on the Web and bringing the increased connectivity of the Web to traditional
client-server and desktop applications.
The Web was created to simplify access to electronically published documents.
Originally just static text pages with hyperlinks to other documents, Web pages
quickly evolved into highly graphical animated presentations. Along the way, a
degree of interactivity was introduced, allowing people browsing the Web to fill out
forms and thereby supply data to the server.
WebObjects allows you to take the next logical step. With it, you can produce
full-fledged Web-accessible applications, for use either across the Internet or within
a corporate intranet. These applications can be HTML-based, and thus accessible
through a Web browser, or can have the full interactivity of a stand-alone
application.
Dynamic HTML Publishing
Much of the content on the Web is textual or graphical material that doesn’t change
much over time. However, there is increasing demand for sites that publish
ever-changing data: breaking news stories, up-to-the-minute stock quotes, or the
current weather are good examples.