Adding More Power and Flexibility to Zim

Zim is a powerful and flexible environment for developing and using all types of database applications.

Zim‘s Entity-Relationship (ER) data model and fully-integrated Object Dictionary enable progressive program development, whether the information processing system is simple or complex. Zim Server provides a database server capability that can be used with ZIMQTC or other client processes.

The following topics describe ZimWeb, including its operations and how it can be used to create Web applications using Zim.

The Technology inside ZimWeb

ZimWeb has some distinct advantages over previous solutions, including:

• It is an all-Java servlet – it runs on any platform with a Java Servlet Engine, such as Apache’s Tomcat
• It makes web development for Zim applications easier with support for features such as client sessions, cookies, etc.
• It supports XML and multiple client types (web browsers, cellphones and tablets, etc.) by integrating with the Apache’s Xalan-Java version 2 XSLT styling engine and Apache’s Formatting Object Processor.

To help you understand why these technologies are so useful for developing the Internet and other applications we recommend that you read the bibliography.

ZimWeb and Zim Server

ZimWeb makes use of ZIMSERVER to access Zim databases and connects a Zim Server to the internet. Thus, a good working knowledge of the Zim Server product is required for the development of Web applications using Zim.

This user guide describes the features and functions of ZimWeb. There is also a complete description of the implementation of the example application. Most Web applications using ZimWeb can be modeled after this example. Since the example does not use all features of ZimWeb, a number of additional topics provide reference information on software installation, configuration, etc.