Solutions

Customizable

JHZ-CS Solutions are written in open sourced platform independence supportive PERL (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language). Logic modules are easily modifiable. This means they can be customized to enhance capabilities and features. Logic module are coded using industry standard structured programming practices so they are easy to work with. And, they are designed for both programming experts and those with no programming expertise in mind. Logic components are isolated from HTML and CSS components allowing desired results to be achieved without posing risks of corruption to logic. This is achieved using customizable page templates.

Customizable Page Templates

JHZ-CS solutions achieve optimum website consistency of both function and appearance through the use of Customizable Page Templates. The use of templates enables webmasters to design and deploy rapidly and simplifies maintenance. Templates take advantage of the benefits of reuse centralizing shared components and their attributes. And, JHZ-CS solutions produce resulting web pages dynamically generated in real-time. This allows for massive website updates to be performed with minimal changes and uploads.

Updates are easily performed using a standard text editor or HTML authoring tool and uploaded to the web server using a standard FTP (File Transfer Protocol) application. Data modifications are also reflected immediately; see IID for details about data components. Modifications are reflected across the entire website immediately upon upload without need having to regenerate the entire website and uploading a multitude of static web pages.

How Templates Are Used

Templates are used to format dynamically generated web pages. "Dynamically Generated" means a new page is generated each time it is accessed in real-time. Page generation includes conditional processing combined with variable replacement with the template providing formatting aspects. Since templates are isolated from logical components, they may be modified without risk to the logic that use them.

Benefits

Use of templates to dynamically generate pages in real-time has a series of benefits. In addition to being able to develop and maintain a website presenting massive amounts of data by simply maintaining a few templates and the Item Information Dataset (IID), many other benefits are immediately realized. For example, hyperlink "title" attributes and "onmouseover" status bar messages can be automatically generated via simple references to data items maintained in the IID. "META" tags such as description and keywords parameters can be generated providing search engine robots and spiders enhanced data to significantly improve indexing of a website resulting in improved search engine exposure and positioning. Since data use by the templates is centralized, errors are easily identifiable and corrected in a single location; as opposed to across a multitude of static pages.

Think about being able to add a link to a new function or graphic on all pages at a website by simply updating a few templates, then uploading them, as opposed to changing and uploading a multitude of static pages. The time, effort and resources required is substantially reduced permitting attention to other more important business activities.

Template Structure & Syntax

Templates are standard HTML page documents that also include Special Markup elements; discussed below. Being standard HTML page documents they may be easily edited using a standard text or HTML editor/authoring tool.

Special Markup syntax closely resembles HTML allowing webmasters to be immediately productive without having to master a complex learning curve.

The Special Markup elements consists of two types:

1. Template Directives - are in the form of HTML Comments. Directives specify demarcations and conditional statements for repeating and nested data groups.

   Example:

   <!-- JHZ-CS Repeat Start -->
   ...
   <!-- JHZ-CS Repeat End -->

2. Template Variables - are variable names wrapped in less-than "<<" greater-than ">>" pairs. They are used to refer to IID data items.

   Example:

   <<item_num>>

   Supporting HTML authoring tool's source formatting functions and automatic special character conversion, Template Variables may optionally be specified using less-than and greater-than HTML entities.

   Example:

   &lt;&lt;item_num&gt;&gt;

   Two Special Keywords support Template Variables references contained in HTML anchor HREFs, anchor names, and HREF parameter for replacement values containing space(s) which would otherwise result in an HTML syntax error. The Special Keywords are:

   ANCHOR
   PARAM

   When ANCHOR is specified spaces are converted to underscores "_".
   When PARAM (as in parameter) is specified spaces are converted to %20 ASCII Hexadecimal equivalent for the space character.

   Example:

   <a href=#"<<item_category ANCHOR>>">
   <a name="<<item_category ANCHOR>>">

   <a href="/cgi-bin/c.cgi?c=<<item_category PARAM>>">