If you would like to try out this beta software - plus the chance to win an iPod touch or one of ten runner up prizes - you can register online today at http://www.dataline.co.uk/
About i5®
Dataline Software's i5 is a powerful and sophisticated web developer's toolkit, designed to deal with the increasingly complex demands of the Internet environment. Exclusively developed by Dataline, i5 incorporates pioneering tools for web enabling databases - that make it possible to take live information from multiple SQL databases and make it readily available via browsers and mobile devices - to employees, suppliers and customers.
Rich in functionality, the i5 Studio design environment contains a powerful set of tools and SQL aware wizards that are quick to learn and easy to use. It enables developers to quickly build and deploy browser-based applications with as much complexity and sophistication as required.
Web designers and authors can remotely create and edit their web sites quickly and easily without a high level knowledge of SQL, HTML or programming skills. As well as web-enabling corporate databases in traditional browser environments, i5 is unique in that it makes it possible to rapidly build e-business applications that work on browsers and mobile devices (phones and PDAs) simultaneously.
Some of the new features available in version 3.5 include…
1. A native .NET Programming Interface for developing web applications.
The real value of i5 as a development environment lies in the way that it allows the programmer to extend the point and click capacities of i5 Studio with bespoke business logic code. The i5 .NET Programming Interface provides the developer with a complete set of classes for processing data, generating pages dynamically and generally providing the control required to organize sophisticated web applications. Previously COM+ based, the new Programming Interface has been ported to native .NET CLR, to allow seamless integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.
2. Browser independent CSS rendering.
There are many benefits to using CSS to control your web site; it is easier to maintain, quicker to draw, and is search engine friendly. However, the standard support given by most web development tools to CSS is a simple one - build once, test everywhere. Currently, different web browsers treat CSS slightly differently, so when your web site is created you need to test for cross-browser incompatibilities. The presentation layer in i5 eliminates the need for this time consuming testing by ensuring that any CSS it generates compensates for the inconsistencies in a particular brand (or version) of browser. Also, the CSS in i5 allows web developers to benefit from the improved speed & accessibility that CSS gives, safe in the knowledge that the presentation layer automatically handles screen display for CSS-free browsers, such as mobile phones and handheld devices.
3. Enhanced support for Search Engine Optimization and permalinks.
Every page in a web site supports one of two different submission methods; either GET or POST. The former means that information entered by a user is encoded as a URL, which is human readable and visible in the web address bar of your browser. The latter - typically used by interactive Web 2.0 applications - is sent as form data and is notoriously difficult for search engine spiders like Google or Bing to index. Version 3.5 of i5 has been enhanced so that both GET and POST submission methods can be used, resulting in pages that are highly interactive, yet still capable of being spidered, bookmarked and "permalinked"
