OWT - Open Web Toolkit

OWT

The Open Web Toolkit


Table of Contents

What is OWT?

OWT stands for Open Web Toolkit. It is a collection of building blocks to build powerful server-side web applications. These building blocks may come from various sources, but the core of OWT is maintained by me, and is freely available in source code form for most platforms.

At the core of OWT is its unique way of manipulating the HTML document that will be returned by your application as a response to the client request. Instead of generating an HTML output using programming language statements as the traditional approach suggests, OWT provides an API that dynamically updates an existing HTML document. Special tags are embedded in the HTML source, and OWT converts these tags into a hierarchy of objects in memory. Then you call these objects' methods to update the HTML source, and OWT regenerates the modified HTML document for you.

In addition to the core HTML manipulation API, here is a list of existing and potential OWT tools:

In brief, anything that can be useful for a server-side web application can be built as a OWT tool!

The current version of OWT is written in C++ and is intended to be used for CGI applications. However, the HTML manipulation concepts used by OWT are compatible with the Java Servlet technology, and it is in my plans to eventually port OWT to work with Java Servlets.

Why OWT?

First of all: because I feel there is a need for it! The main reason that led to the creation of OWT was that I needed a good base for the web application development projects in which I was involved.

Furthermore, I thought that there could be some benefits in making OWT openly accessible:

How is OWT going to evolve?

The best scenario would be that I buy lottery tickets, and hope to win enough to make a living while developing OWT and giving it away for free. Unfortunately this approach does not seem to work very well. :-(

So I had to come up with a Plan B, just in case...

Where do I get it?

Sorry, there is no public release of OWT available yet. It is currently being used in a couple of web application development projects, but it still lacks a couple of things, like good supporting documentation to be ready for a public release. I also have to sort out the licensing terms for the source code before I publicly release it.

Depending on the amount of interest and potential contributors, the first public release may be available in a couple of weeks, or only in several months...

Please Email me (danmo@videotron.ca) if you feel that OWT could be useful for you. I would also like to offer my services as a contract developer to organizations that have web application development projects. :-)


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Last Update: November 20, 1998
Daniel Morissette, danmo@videotron.ca