Developers > Supported Technologies

Supported Technologies in ExSite Webware

Developers > Supported Technologies


What Web Technologies are Supported by ExSite Webware?

TechnologyIntegrated Support1Compatibility2
HTML4
yes 
HTML53partial
yes
XHTML yes

CSS2, CSS3

yes
Static HTML files for performance4
yes

Dynamic HTML files for flexibility5yes

Dreamweaver and similar web authoring packages6

yes
Apache2

yes
Other Webservers7

yes
LAMP Servers8
yes
 
Unix, OS X8

yes 
Shared hosting, virtual hosts
 yes
Multiple sites, domain names served from one installation9
yes
 
Javascript10
yes
jquery and other Javascript frameworks10
partial
yes
Java
 yes
Flash11
partial
yes
self-hosted video12  yes
3rd-party video12  yes
PHP13  yes
ASP13  yes
AJAX14 yes
 
Perl
yes

SpeedyCGI, Persistent Perl
yes

other server-side languages15  yes
MySQL yes
Other DBs (PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, etc.)16
 yes
Load balancing, high-performance archtectures17  yes
  1. Integrated support means the system provides built-in functions to simplify working with these technologies.
  2. Compatible means the system works perfectly well with these technologies, but otherwise does not assist with them.
  3. System components output HTML that is is compatible with HTML4, but can generate HTML5-only tags on request. Some HTML5 form/input features are built-in.
  4. Static pages are published 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.
  5. Dynamic pages are served using CGI.  Pages can be configured as static or dynamic, but in practice they are all hybrid, with both static and dynamic views.
  6. The system has a function to import templates designed using Dreamweaver or other web design packages.
  7. ExSite presumes that is running on the Apache web server.  However, it should work with any CGI-capable HTTP server.
  8. ExSite presumes that it is running on a LAMP configuration server, but it is somewhat server agnostic, and is compatible with any Unix-like server environment, including OS X.
  9. There is no limit to the number of sites and domains that can be managed from a single install.
  10. A small selection of convenient Javascript and DHTML functions is built-in, including some useful jquery plugins. Custom Javascript is easy to add as content.
  11. Flash (swf) files are automatically detected and displayed with appropriate embed tags. The system does not manage or allow editing of the Flash files themselves.
  12. HTML4 video can be added using appropriate object/embed tags, or a suitable Flash player. For 3rd-party videos (eg. YouTube), simply copy the embed code that they provide.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Requires alternate database driver module, not included in the basic distribution. Perl DBI is used for basic communication with the database(s).
  17. The simple model of static files and CGI means that ExSite is compatible with a variety of load balancing and caching systems.

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