IntraWeb version 6 introduces IWP's (IntraWeb Pages). You can think of IWP's as server-side pages that are processed automatically by an ISAPI/DSO application. They are similar to the same philosophy as asp pages.

The concept behind IWP is that you can create both static and dynamic HTML pages with any extension you want (by default IWP is used although you do not need to specify this anywhere in your application) and the web-server processes the pages and returns either dynamic or static content depending on the nature of the page. Think of it as a reverse process to what PageMode is. To expand a bit more on this, let us first see how PageMode works.

PageMode

The first thing you need to do when developing PageMode applications is to create your WebBroker/WebSnap application and add IWPageForm (alternatively for 3.2 you would use IWPageForm32) forms to your project. You would then design the form and add the dynamic functionality to these. Once complete, you would use a TIWPageProducer to return the content to the client (browser). Optionally you could use a template to customize the form.

IWP works on the same principle, except in this case, your first step is to create your HTML template and then your form. Although you could do it in reverse order, it makes more sense this way since IWP's pull the content from the template. That is, in normal template processing, the IWForm descendant looks for a template and replaces the controls with those on the form. In IWP's, the TEMPLATE looks for the controls and they are replaced at runtime. The template is pulling the information from the form.

IWP is not only limited to the previous, but it also makes the task of developing dynamic-driven websites even more simple than it is now using PageMode. Let us see a step-by-step approach on how to make a IWP website.