Beta
Project Overview
Websites are great for gathering information and sharing ideas but the HTML behind modern sites can be really tedious. Larger websites have separated out the presentation from the content by assigning those tasks to different people. Technologies such as ASP, JSP and EJB offer different approaches to solve the problem but in many cases can be overkill especially for websites that don't belong to companies listed on the Forbes 500.
One of the main reasons the World Wide Web took off is because, by design, it is simple. While web sites have become more complex and browsers are expected to handle more, the basic protocols between the client and server have remained the same. I created a prototype CGI application to run this site because I too find constantly working with HTML to be tedious. My first draft was GNet (short for Gaspar.net) which built content from files uploaded to an FTP site into the site's page layout.
That approach worked, at first. Using security permissions already built into the FTP protocol, I could manipulate my website with basic text files and create new content with a simple text editor such as notepad. The draw backs with GNet is that the page rendering was done in code so there was always one look to the site. Plus there wasn't a way to add on custom processing should I want to use the system in other applications.
The next version, built to address both those issues, was renamed Web Blaze (which isn't short for anything it just sounds cool.) Web Blaze address the rendering with a pseudo compiler system. The system starts with a template and then process Web Blaze tags to customize the page content. Each tag along with non Web Blaze data is assembled into a goal stack. When the stack is exhausted the goal is the rendered web page. The template is where CSS, DIV tags and other layout code reside. The embedded tags then specify what files to import, images to embed and menus to render. This allows for the complete separation of software developer, presentation developer and content writers.
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 View this page with the standard template
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Web Blaze has its own object library. Each Web Blaze tag represents an object that Web Blaze can invoke to render data. The object library is expandable so custom items can be implemented server side. For example, the scoring modules for a local league process ranks and win/loss records out of an XML file. A Web Blaze object converts that data to HTML. The Weblaze tag of that object specifies where in the HTML page the converted HTML is to be rendered.
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| View a page with embedded Web Blaze Objects
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Although it is only beta and currently being test live on this site, the primary goal for the Web Blaze project is to be a drop in component for server front ends. This will allow the server developers to integrate Web Blaze as part of the UI rendering system and preserving the separation of presentation and content developers.
