Introduction

Addressing the need to execute PL/B programs using industry standard browser clients, Sunbelt provides a ‘PL/B Web Server’ (PWS). The PL/B Web Server allows execution of applications developed as normal PL/B programs using industry standard web browsers. These browsers include Internet Explorer, FireFox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera.

The PL/B programs may also be executed using a Sunbelt Web App (SWA). The Sunbelt Web App is built using Apache Cordova for IOS devices, Android devices, Windows RT 8, and Fire O/S.

The PWS server executes PL/B programs in the same manner as the Sunbelt Application Server but uses standard web based technologies to interact with the clients. These technologies include HTML5, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML ), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), jQuery User Interface JavaScript libraries, and specialized Sunbelt JavaScript code. The PL/B developer does not need to have any knowledge of these web technologies. Standard PL/B coding techniques are used by the developer in the PL/B web applications.

For the more knowledgeable web application developer, extensions to the PL/B language allow the implementation of custom HTML5 pages, JavaScript functions, and CSS classes for their applications.

The PWS server includes a large subset of the normal PL/B GUI objects. The Sunbelt Designer has been enhanced to allow the creation of PL/B Web Forms (.pwf). These PWF files are similar to PLF files. Program development, compilation, and execution methods are the same as previous Sunbelt runtimes. In fact, a PL/B Web Application can be executed by other PL/B runtimes keeping in mind that there can be differences depending on the GUI objects and extensions being used in a program. Likewise, an existing PL/B application can be executed by the PWS server as long as there are no language conflicts of features or objects being used.