Delphi Sources - Dynamic Web Pages - English Delphi Programming Guide

Dynamic Web Pages

When you browse a website, you generally download static pages—HTML-format text files—from the web server to your client computer. As a web developer, you can create these pages manually, but for most businesses, it makes more sense to build the static pages from information in a database (a SQL server, a series of files, and so on). Using this approach, you're basically generating a snapshot of the data in HTML format, which is reasonable if the data isn't subject to frequent changes. This approach was discussed in Chapter 19.

As an alternative to static HTML pages, you can build dynamic pages. To do this, you extract information directly from a database in response to the browser's request, so that the HTML sent by your application displays current data, not an old snapshot of the data. This approach makes sense if the data changes frequently.

As mentioned earlier, there are a couple of ways you can program custom behavior at the web server, and these are ideal techniques you can use to generate HTML pages dynamically. In addition to script-based techniques, which are very popular, two common protocols for programming web servers are CGI (the Common Gateway Interface) and the web server APIs.

Note

Keep in mind that Delphi's WebBroker technology (available in both the Enterprise Studio and Professional editions) flattens the differences between CGI and server APIs by providing a common class framework. This way, you can easily turn a CGI application into an ISAPI library or integrate it into Apache.

An Overview of CGI

CGI is a standard protocol for communication between the client browser and the web server. It's not a particularly efficient protocol, but it is widely used and is not platform specific. This protocol allows the browser both to ask for and to send data, and it is based on the standard command-line input and output of an application (usually a console application). When the server detects a page request for the CGI application, it launches the application, passes command-line data from the page request to the application, and then sends the application's standard output back to the client computer.

You can use many tools and languages to write CGI applications, and Delphi is only one of them. Despite the obvious limitation that your web server must be an Intel-based Windows or Linux system, you can build some fairly sophisticated CGI programs in Delphi and Kylix. CGI is a low-level technique, because it uses the standard command-line input and output along with environment variables to receive information from the web server and pass it back.

To build a CGI program without using support classes, you can create a Delphi console application, remove the typical project source code, and replace it with the following statements:

program CgiDate;
{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}
   
uses SysUtils;
   
begin
  writeln ('content-type: text/html');
  writeln;
  writeln ('<html><head>');
  writeln ('<title>Time at this site</title>');
  writeln ('</head><body>');
  writeln ('<h1>Time at this site</h1>');
  writeln ('<hr>');
  writeln ('<h3>');
  writeln (FormatDateTime('"Today is " dddd, mmmm d, yyyy,' +
      '"<br> and the time is" hh:mm:ss AM/PM', Now));
  writeln ('</h3>');
  writeln ('<hr>');
  writeln ('<i>Page generated by CgiDate.exe</i>');
  writeln ('</body></html>');
end.

CGI programs produce a header followed by the HTML text using the standard output. If you execute this program directly, you'll see the text in a terminal window. If you run it instead from a web server and send the output to a browser, the formatted HTML text will appear, as shown in Figure 20.1.

Figure 20.1: The output of the CgiDate application, as seen in a browser

Building advanced applications with plain CGI requires a lot of work. For example, to extract status information about the HTTP request, you need to access the relevant environment variables, as in the following:

// get the pathname
GetEnvironmentVariable ('PATH_INFO', PathName, sizeof (PathName));

Using Dynamic Libraries

A completely different approach is the use of the web server APIs: the popular ISAPI (Internet Server API, introduced by Microsoft), the less common NSAPI (Netscape Server API), or the Apache API. These APIs allow you to write a library that the server loads into its own address space and keeps in memory. Once it loads the library, the server can execute individual requests via threads within the main process, instead of launching a new EXE for every request (as it must in CGI applications).

When the server receives a page request, it loads the DLL (if it hasn't done so already) and executes the appropriate code, which may launch a new thread or use an existing one to process the request. The library then sends the appropriate HTTP data back to the client that requested the page. Because this communication generally occurs in memory, this type of application tends to be faster than CGI.