Chapter 5 Using PowerDynamo with EAServer

PowerDynamo overview

You can use PowerDynamo to implement thin-client Web applications for an Internet or intranet site that can support millions of hits per day. Dynamo provides the tools necessary to build and manage a thin-client Web application containing both static HTML and dynamic, data-driven content.

Not only does Dynamo leverage a powerful object-oriented scripting language called DynaScript, but Dynamo applications can be extended to call any component supported by EAServer. The Dynamo application server acts as an intermediary between the Web server and the database management system. The application server processes templates, which are HTML pages with embedded SQL or COMPONENT statements and DynaScript scripts, and serves the resulting output, together with static HTML, to the Web server. Dynamo's unique use of the database as a Web repository allows for entire applications to be distributed using existing database replication facilities.

With Dynamo, you can:

Build templates, SQL statements, and scripts for Web pages by using a collection of powerful, customizable wizards.
Modify the source for your Web pages by using a syntax-highlighting editor.
Write scripts in DynaScript, which is designed specifically for server-side scripting with the Dynamo application server. DynaScript is fully compatible with ECMAScript. ECMAScript is the standard for JavaScript and JScript-like languages.
Store and execute the thin-client Web application in a database and manage it using Sybase Central, a graphical server administration tool.
Use existing database replication technologies to distribute entire Web solutions (including both application and data) to wherever the application is needed. Web solutions can be distributed to multiple servers for load balancing, various offline workgroups, or even to laptops for mobile users.
Use the PowerDynamo Personal Web Server to test Web sites locally and to provide offline access.
Invoke EAServer components. PowerDynamo can access EAServer components through Java, ActiveX, SQL queries, or PowerDynamo tags. Access the EJB interfaces of the components.
Integrate with other Web development tools, including PowerSite.

Access Java classes from within Dynamo scripts. These classes may be stored within a database or a file system.
Create and manipulate XML. The template wizard from Sybase Central can be used to create queries that generate output in either HTML or XML. The XML Document Object Model may be used to manipulate XML documents. Dynamo tags and built-in functions are also available for the creation and manipulation of XML documents.
Send, receive, and manipulate mail from within a PowerDynamo Web site.
Enable FTP functions in PowerDynamo Web sites.

Dynamo provides the following additional services:

Database connection pooling to allow for reuse of database connections and eliminate the time-consuming and resource-intensive process of constantly creating new database connections.
End user session management to maintain client state information.
Page caching the HTML output of frequently accessed pages, improving retrieval time.
Document generation scheduling to schedule the processing of specific templates or scripts, whose content generation may be lengthy.

Dynamo is available on AIX with NSAPI, CGI, and the Personal Web Server. CGI and the Personal Web Server are available on Solaris (NSAPI is supported from earlier versions of Dynamo.)

For more information

For more information, see the PowerDynamo documentation, which includes these books:

User's Guide
Reference Manual