What Web Technologies are Supported by ExSite Webware?
The ExSite templating system supports whichever version of HTML and CSS you wish to code in. It is common practice to import templates designed using Dreamweaver or other web design packages.ExSite is designed to work with the Apache web server. However, it should work with any CGI-capable HTTP server. It works best on LAMP web servers, but works equally well in OS/X or Unix. One of our developers even had it running under IIS.
ExSite ultimately publishes static content out to conventional files that are served in the traditional fashion by Apache. For instance, your home page will publish to a regular old file called index.html, by default. This makes it compatible with a wide variety of webserving environments, load balancers, and caching systems. If your site content is all static, then in principle you can zip up your document folder and move the files to a new server without ExSite installed, and it should still work. No special Apache configurations are required to make the system work, and it is very happy running on a shared server in a virtualhost configuration.
From ExSite's point of view, all content is ultimately either HTML or a URL to a file in some other format. This makes it easy to manage all standard (and many non-standard) web technologies, including Javascript and Flash.
PHP (and ASP) can also be easily inserted into pages, and is treated as normal content that is published out to web page files. As long as your file suffixes are correct, the web server will serve the files as proper PHP files.
ExSite has integrated AJAX support. All plug-ins can be invoked in a traditional or AJAX mode, and no understanding of AJAX is required by the web developer to make use of this functionality.
Server-side programming is done primarily in Perl, but other languages can be supported by using Perl as the API/glue layer between ExSite and your application. Persistent Perl is supported for high-performance applications.
ExSite uses a MySQL database back-end by default. However, it is not difficult to plug in a different database engine, and ExSite has been used with PostGreSQL, Sybase SQLanywhere, and even plain text files for its databases. You can connect to multiple database servers if building a distributed application.
