What Is Caché Server Pages?

This simple Web page uses Caché Server Pages. Caché Server Pages (or CSP) is a set of technologies, built into Caché, that let you easily build and deploy high-performance, highly-scalable Web applications.

CSP supports two styles of Web development:

• You can develop applications programmatically by creating classes (derived from the %CSP.PageOpens in a new tab class) that generate HTML statements in response to incoming HTTP requests. This approach is good for people with programming backgrounds and works well for data-driven, dynamic applications—that is, applications whose pages are generated at runtime based on information stored within a database. (If you are reading this tutorial on-line, then you are looking at an example of such a data-driven application).

• You can develop applications using specially marked-up HTML files. These files are fed through a special processor (the CSP Rules Engine) and are automatically converted to CSP classes. CSP includes a number of special HTML tags for easily using objects and server-side scripts within HTML files. This approach is good for people with a background in Web design and also works well for developing data-driven dynamic applications. HTML development tools can be used with this approach.

You can combine these two techniques within an application for maximum flexibility.

Within this tutorial we will use the marked-up HTML file approach and use Studio as a development environment. Note that you could develop this, or any other, web application using the programmatic approach. With either technique you can use Studio as a development environment.

During application development, we create Web pages as markup files with a .csp extension. These files are converted into Caché classes by the Caché Server Pages Compiler.

Later, when the application is running, the Web Server sends requests for Caché Server Pages to Caché, which uses the appropriate classes to generate the required HTML.