Abstract

Janus Web Server plays to the strengths of the web as a development platform by providing simple, direct access to data, and precise control over the caching and page expiration parameters that make the web the efficient information delivery platform it was designed to be.

Janus Web Server can also be used to launch non-web-browser applications such as spreadsheet packages and word processors. In addition many of these software packages can now make direct http requests to a Janus Web Server application, obviating the need for users to exit their prefered data analysis tools in order to use a web browser.

Demonstrations

The Business Data presentation shows a variety of spreadsheet applications and explains how spreadsheet data is built and sent over the web. The simplest Excel demo allows users to select fields to be downloaded into their spreadsheet in comma-separated format. A more complex Server Side Include application allows users to select the download format providing output in "comma-separated values" or "data interchange" formats (.csf and .dif, both standard spreadsheet data specifications), or html table-formatted output.

New Site Development and Data Presentation Technology

While it has always been possible to develop Janus Web Server sites using site development tools like Microsoft FrontPage or NetObjects Fusion, it has not always been easy to integrate dynamic data into the pages of sites developed this way. Server Side Includes - the latest industry standard to be supported by Janus Web Server - addresses this issue. Server Side Includes (SSI) also provide for rapid development of sites that merge dynamic data into a large amount of graphics or text.

To use SSI, the web site developer simply inserts SSI tags into the site's web pages wherever Janus Web Server is expected to fill in the page content. The Janus Web Server manager adds an "SSI" directive to the appropriate web rules to tell the Janus Web port to scan for the tags. When an SSI tag is encountered a server-side action is taken - typically a program is run or the content of a Model 204 procedure is inserted into the page as it is sent. Using SSI minimizes the work the Model 204 developer has to do to build the dynamic portion of a page, and it separates the graphics and layout tasks from the database tasks even while server up all content directly from Model 204.

The Sirius web site has a sample web application of the Sybase Pubs database that was developed using NetObjects Fusion. The data is in Model 204 and is accessed via SSI requests from selected pages inside the application. Whether you're an experienced user of Janus Web Server, or new to Sirius' web technology, you should try building a site using Janus Web's Server and SSI. Quite simply, it is the fastest way to bring up a Janus Web site, and greatly simplifies all database tasks related to the web.