Overview

What is WhizBase?

WhizBase is a web-authoring tool for building dynamic, database driven web content. Its main purpose is to build efficient, fast, easy-to-use Internet/intranet web applications, but it is also a great tool for fast and easy development of eye-catching, CMS-powered web presentations, with just a few lines of code.

How WhizBase works?

Operation of WhizBase can be compared to mail merge function of any text processor. When deploying mail merge, user must create a standard letter with spaces left where mail-merge function will put contents of database fields. In such a fashion - user can create thousands of personalised letters, each one created by merging contents of database fields and specially prepared text document.

WhizBase works very much like above described mail merge function. On one hand, a user creates HTML (template) pages with places where contents of database fields (or other WhizBase functions) will be placed.
Pursuant to this principle, user can use WhizBase to create HTML, XML, RTF (or any other text-based file format) pages containing information from merging template pages and the database, easy-to-use database management system (for adding, updating and deleting records), content management system for a website, complex web applications or any other type of dynamic web content.

A practical example

Let us take an example of a car-dealership. Their web site should have an on line catalogue of all cars currently available. For this purpose, it is not very difficult to build static web page containing all necessary information about every single car. However, this page will be changed very often, i.e. every time when something changes (price change, new car offered, a car being sold, etc.). This requires someone with HTML knowledge to update pages each time - an expensive and time-consuming activity.

Most of car-dealerships have database with all this information for internal purposes and in most cases, that database is updated on an hourly basis. Therefore, the easiest way to make this information available to visitors of their website is to put this database on the website, create several WBSP documents, and have WhizBase do the rest. In that case all the web page building work has to be done only once and by only maintaining the database (and this can also be accomplished using WhizBase) - all web pages will always be up to date. Of course, this may be done with or without WhizBase.

The usual way

Database-driven web content is built usually either as a combination of ordinary (static) HTML documents and CGI program that will perform database search and write content to the web browser as HTML code, or as a set of server-side scripts, which means that the programming is required. Most web authors are used to develop web pages using WYSIWYG web authoring tools, with no programming (most of them never change, or even see HTML code generated by authoring software).

When the web site is finally completed (including CGI program or server-side scripts) any change on the site (new web design, new table in database, new database, new report, etc.) will require additional programming.

What WhizBase can do?

The situation in example we explained above is the perfect reason to use WhizBase. Unlike other solutions mentioned, WhizBase is not a programming language, but a web development tool and therefore it requires minimum development skills. It supports almost any database type including Microsoft® Access versions 2.0 to 2007, dBASE versions III, IV and 5.0, Paradox versions 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, FoxPro versions 2.0, 2.5, 2.6 and 3.0, Microsoft® Excel files, Text files in tabular format, all databases supporting ODBC connections and any database that can be accessed using ADO or DAO objects.

Main component of the WhizBase powered web solution is a WBSP document - simple text document containing any content placed by web author (HTML, XML, RTF, TXT, etc.) with WhizBase variables, functions, and tags added.

As all other hypertext pre-processors, WhizBase works following this procedure:

1. User calls WBSP document (by entering its name in the browsers address bar or clicking on the hyperlink or a button on the web page).
2. Web server invokes WhizBase and passes the request values to it.
3. WhizBase processes the request on the server side.
4. WhizBase writes the result to the users' client as any other web content (depending on content type).

Although the WhizBase procedure may seem considerably the same as previous, there is a huge difference - with WhizBase no real programming is required - WhizBase will do all the work for all databases (of same or different types). This way you have more time to focus on building good-looking and efficient web solution.

How does WhizBase code look?

Dynamic content with no programming, does it really work?
Well this is a simple example:

HTML CODE VIEW:

<html>
    <body>
    Hello! 
    Your IP address is <b>$wbe[REMOTE_ADDR]</b>.<br>
    Today is $wbfn[weekdays], $wbfn[fdt(dd-mmm-yyyy)]. 
    </body>
</html>

WYSIWYG EDITOR VIEW:

Hello! Your IP address is $wbe[REMOTE_ADDR].
Today is $wbfn[weekdays], $wbfn[fdt(dd-mmm-yyyy)].

AN OUTPUT (RESULT):

Hello! Your IP address is 192.168.0.203.
Today is Monday, 14-Apr-2008.

Even in this brief example, you can see how it differs from a script written in programming languages like Perl, JavaScript, or C or from a code written by using other hypertext pre-processors like PHP or ASP. There are no start and end tags, but very simple placeholders that will be replaced with proper content during page processing, without changing any other part of the page, including text-formatting applied to placeholder.

Since all WBSP code is processed on the server, the visitors receive only the results of the script and have no idea what code was used to generate the page. If you configure WBSP on your server to process files with extension HTM, it will be impossible for your visitors to know what is powering your site.

The great thing about the WBSP is that it may be used to achieve highly impressive results with only few WBSP instructions included in HTML, and still it may be used to build highly complex web-based applications. We strongly believe that anyone can achieve useful results in less than 30 minutes.