Apple WebObjects 5 - Manual (Page 14)

14 Dynamic HTML Publishing
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Apple Computer, Inc. January 2002
C H A P T E R 2
What Is WebObjects?
A typical website is organized like Figure 2-1. A user’s Web browser requests pages
using URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). These requests are sent over the network
to the HTTP server, which analyzes each request and selects the appropriate Web
page to return to the user’s browser. This Web page is simply a text file that contains
HTML code. Using the HTML tags embedded within the file received from the
HTTP server, the browser renders the page.
Figure 2-1 A static publishing site
Static publishing sites are easy to maintain. There are a number of tools in the
market that allow you to create HTML pages with a relatively small amount of
effort. And as long as the content of your pages doesn’t change too often, it isn’t that
difficult to keep them up-to-date. Dynamic publishing sites, however, are a
different story. Without WebObjects it could take a small army to keep a breaking
news site up to date.
WebObjects was designed from the beginning to allow you to quickly and easily
publish dynamic data over the Web. You create HTML templates that indicate
where on the Web page the dynamic data is to be placed, and a WebObjects
application fills in the content when your application is accessed. The process is
much like a mail merge. The information your Web pages publish can reside in a
database or some other permanent data storage (files, perhaps), or it can even be
calculated or generated at the time a page is accessed. The pages are also highly
interactive—you can fully specify the way the user navigates through them.
Web
browser
Web
browser
Web
browser
Web server
Request
http://www.apple.com
.
.
.
Static HTML pages
Response
HTML page