Top

Previous

Next

TOC

Index

Application Development - an Overview

Applications developed for the Oracle WebServer have two general types of components:

Web pages, whether statically coded or generated at runtime from PL/SQL or Java. These constitute both the user interface and the final product. Using LiveHTML, these can reference applications executed on the server when the page is accessed.
Code executed on the server. There are several kinds of code that can be so executed, but all of them eventually produce HTML that is sent to the browser as Web pages.

The Web pages you create will themselves generate URLs that determine what other Web pages are retrieved and what code is executed on the server. Therefore, you must write your Web pages to generate URLs that contain information that the server needs to find the desired Web pages or execute the desired code. These are the general ways your Web pages can produce such URLs:

They can be explicitly given as part of hypertext anchors. In this case, the URL is transmitted whenever the user triggers the hypertext link.
They can come from a user typing them directly into a search dialog box.
They can come from HTML forms.

From the viewpoint of the client, all of these techniques specify the retrieval of a Web page. What determines whether a Web page is simply fetched from the file system or generated by some code executed on the server is the location specified in the URL. The WebServer understands that some locations contain files and others reference WRB Services or CGI programs. It is the configuration of the WebServer that determines which is which. You could say that the server extensions s appear to the client as "virtual files."

Click Here to

Go to the top of the section.

Click Here to Go to the previous topic.

Click Here to Go to the next topic.

Click here to Go to the Table of Contents.

Click here to Go to the Index.

This document was last modified at 03:55pm PST on March 27, 1996.

To report any problems or comments, e-mail Oracle WebServer Documentation.