Language Guide

Note: The Language Guide can also be viewed as a single large Web Page if you'd like to print the entire document.

Who Should Read This

This Language Guide is intended to show you how to use heitml.

Our Introduction and heitml Features sections have already provided you with a few ideas regarding the unique possibilities afforded by a product that combines HTML Web Publishing with SQL databases.

But heitml if also a full-featured programming language. It offers structured, modular programming techniques in an easy-to-learn format. In fact, heitml offers so many straight-forward, common sense solutions to traditional Web Applications development problems that you can't really appreciate it until you've had a chance to work with it for awhile.

This manual is intended to provide a framework of understanding that will enable you to get your heitml applications up and running in the shortest possible time. This is not an HTML tutorial, however, so if you don't already have a working knowledge of it, you should buy an HTML reference book and keep it handy.

One of heitml's many strengths is its ability to interact with SQL Databases in an almost invisible manner. Even if you have no previous experience with SQL you'll find it a relatively simple matter to create a wide range of Database Applications with the tools provided in our dba Library.

Every computer language has it's own rules and commands to learn, and heitml is no different. But we think you'll find heitml so similar to HTML that it will seem like a natural extension of the working habits you've already developed. SQL poses a few new challenges, but if you don't already know the difference between adding a <TABLE> to your HTML Web Pages and "CREATE"-ing a TABLE in SQL, don't panic, because those differences should become clear in the sections where SQL database operations are explained.

Best of all, you don't have to be an experienced programmer to learn how to use heitml as a stand-alone language. Like HTML, heitml was designed to appeal to non-professionals, and you'll be surprised to discover how quickly you can get professional-looking applications up and running. Many books have succeeded in teaching the basics of HTML in a week or less, and we think heitml can be learned in a similar time-frame.

Of course, heitml really shines if you're already familiar with concepts like Modular Programming, Functions, Procedures, and Parameter Passing; topics that have become so important to modern programming languages that professionals would feel lost without them. Again, however, you don't need to panic if these areas are new to you. The Language Guide tells you what you need to know when you need to know it, and it provides many easy to understand examples that demonstrate how these techniques are to be employed.

With the recent announcement from Microsoft that future versions of their Web Browser will be fully integrated with the operating system, it should be clear that "Browser-based" applications are the wave of the future and that programmers (professional or not) will need new tools to help them keep up with this fast changing world. heitml is proud to be among the first of those tools, and we are equally proud that our product has features that will appeal to the most hard-core and dedicated C or Java programmers, yet remains accessible to the legion of non-professional HTML programmers who played such a large part in making the World Wide Web what it is today.

Suffice it to say that, whether you're an HTML programmer who is looking to expand his/her horizons, or a full-time professional who wants to retain the features of his favorite language, yet work within a single integrated environment, we think you'll find that heitml is a software system that truly "takes the World Wide Web to a higher level".