History

The development of WhizBase has begun in early 1997, when our web development team (www.dws.ba) took on the task to develop a web site for the largest regional advertising magazine. The average weekly update was about 600 HTML pages. Since our web development team consisted of only two people at the time, accomplishing the task was "mission impossible". However, the offer was indeed more then generous, though insufficient in terms of hiring new team members (the payment was in commercial ads), so it was an offer we could not refuse.

The initial idea we begun working on, was to create some sort of off-line preprocessor (although, it was not how it was called at the time - Database to HTML converter was a more appropriate term). As we were working on the software, we realized that it may be used for the other clients and the other databases, and it led us to create the template-based output and configurable connection to the database.
The more we were working on the software, the more we realized that off-line approach was not a good solution, so we reprogrammed the software to CGI. It enabled us to be much more productive, and it simplified the process of updating the web sites.
This is how WhizBase 1.0 came about. It had only 3 commands and less than 30 reserved words (variables, tags, functions, comments, etc.)

As our portfolio grew, the tasks our clients set before us were becoming increasingly complex. Thus, the constant modifications and adding new features were required, so we published version 1.1 in October 1999, and made it available to other web developers. This resulted in intense and rapid development of the new features, since in addition to the requests from our web development team (by then it had grown to 5 people), there were many requests and suggestions from other developers who were using the WhizBase.
After the version 3.000, it evolved into a server side scripting engine - hypertext preprocessor, retaining backwards compatibility with all previous versions as much as possible.

The latest version (5.0) was officially published in December 2008. It may be used both as a scripting engine and as a CGI program. It has about 200 reserved words, and it supports almost any database type, still having the ability to create dynamic, eye-catching, database driven web content from the ordinary, static HTML documents with only a few WhizBase reserved words added.

The fact that WhizBase was developed by the experienced web developers, and not by the regular, hard-core programmers who know little (if anything) about the real-life problems web developers live with, separates WhizBase from other hypertext pre-processors and makes it more suitable for an average web developer.