What is the easiest way to create a dynamic web page?

Before I will talk about the topic: Yes, my #DMVVM project is still on hold. I was just too busy to find the time to do the last steps.

I do not talk about the HTML part... From my point of view, it has to be Bootstrap or something similar, so that every target device could be used.

Of course, I'm not talking about static HTML pages, and if you know me just a little bit, you know that I hate PHP and wouldn't use it.

I haven't tested the cross-compiler for Pascal to javascript yet, so even though I've seen it before, I can't really make a judgment on it
.

Of course, I have been using the Webbroker functionality for my WEB projects for years. This technology is ideal for dynamic websites. 

In the past, I had also set up projects with ASP.NET - actually the absolute best way to execute server-side code. Unfortunately, the last compiler (except Prism) was Delphi 2007 and nowadays I would like to use features of the current Delphi versions and compile my ISAPI.DLL to 64 bit.

One really good feature of the Webbroker is, that you can also create it for Linux, but in my case, I always use a Windows-Server. So while the ISAPI.DLL is loaded only once into the memory space of the IIS. The execution performance is the best you can get. Native code running directly on the CPU to deliver the content. 

So why not use it and be happy?

You can upload an HTML file to the Server, you can change tokens to any value you like, you can use a table-producer to show a complete database table inside your content...

But there is one drawback: For every change, you have to recompile your DLL and upload it to the server.

This is of course the same or even more painful if you're not the web designer.

While searching the internet for ideas I found a Razor implementation from Marco Cantù. A nice little piece of code to integrate some functionalities to HTML. But after one day of rewriting, I stop the development and forgot about this idea.

One year later I was working on a new idea to upgrade my TWebbrowser interface to a new level. In our main application, we are using the TWebbrowser component to autofill forms of many different websites. 

(Sad story, which would lead too far here, why the various websites are not able to provide a simple REST web interface)

Some of these websites are disabling the IE so I must upgrade to EDGE. 

With this interface I have reached the same point as with the web design: For every change, I have to recompile the main program.

End of the story? 

Of course not. I had worked briefly on a project where I wrote a UI test framework for our software. For this, I had to use the Pascal script from RemObjects. A small IDE was quickly put together with these components. Unfortunately, the component is somewhat "unwieldy" and I hate to install packages into my IDE. On top, I do not like to click invisible components on a form.

Therefore I wrote - as always - an interface wrapper for these components...

An IDE interface with compiler and runtime and of course separate compiler and runtime.

To do it right from the start, I created the wrapper directly in Fluentdesign and included it in my FDK right away.

Using this Wrapper for webform autofill was done in minutes and now I'm able to load the right methods to do the autofill from our website, without installing a software update of our main application.

Maybe you already have an idea what this is all about.

Of course, now I use this interface for my web design.

Using Pascalscript for web pages is not new, but I have different requirements.

1. A web designer must be able to modify the code.
2. I want the bootstrap layout of the whole website to be visible in the editor so that you don't lose the WYSIWYG view.
3. I want to have a template system, so i don't have to copy header, footer, navigation, etc. in every HTML file.
4. I want to be able to write inline Delphi (PascalScript).
5. I don't want to have to parse the Delphi part over and over again.

And already the solution was obvious:

I parse the HTML page, find includes, find the Delphi parts and find tokens that have to be replaced.

So when a new or changed web page is uploaded to the server, I compare the creation date of the file with the compiled version. If the date differs, the page is compiled and written to disk as a new file, with a replacement table and the appropriate compiled Delphi parts.

If the date ~ is the same, the file is loaded and a new response stream is created from the static parts, the replacements, and by executing the Delphi parts. Vola.

Even though in my tests the analysis and compilation of a "normal" index.html take less than one millisecond, the execution is of course only a stream copy and the runtime of the Delphi scripts.

Usually also faster than one millisecond. (Of course not, if you read 10 million data sets from a database) Here the execution duration is naturally still affected by the Delphi parts.

At the moment I have no time for a demonstration, but a Webinar is on my to-do list.

So stay tuned...