What is a Browser App?    Tutorial

HSP enables you to run your ASP website/intranet applications right inside of the Internet Explorer web browser. It does this by means of a "pluggable protocol" (see Overview page). This is useful for running websites offline whenever necessary.  An HSP Browser App consists of one or more .ASP and/or .HTM files. If you know how to program ASP, you already know how to program Browser Apps since HSP has a subset of the same objects and methods used in ASP. You can write any kind of program for the browser, the same as you would a traditional VB or C++ program. You just use the Internet Explorer browser as the runtime environment for your application. Of course, you can mix ActiveX controls on the webpage with your HTML, which increases the power and flexibility of your browser apps immensely.

Uses for HSP in the Real World

Many people use HSP to run existing ASP websites from CD for various reasons.  Others have created special offline product catalogs, complete with shopping carts that collect order items and submit to a website upon completion.  And still others use HSP for educational software.  Students study the material from HSP files, and can take a test from within the HSP app - all without connecting to the Internet (offline).  At the end of the test, the student connects and submits to the website.

This is a screenshot of a real browser app which connects to a remote database (a database located on a server "somewhere" on the Internet". idbView uses a product named InterAccess to communicate with the remote database). Each time the user clicks on a table name on the left, the table's contents are returned for viewing in the right pane. This particular app uses the Internet, but you could just as easily use ADO to view a local database on your PC or network.

How it works

Each time your .ASP webpage is loaded, the HSP pluggable protocol executes any script code found in the page (VBScript or JScript/Javascript). This script can perform any task, such as read from or update a database, a file or connect to a web service (SOAP) and display the results. You can generate web pages "on the fly" by mixing static HTML in the page with dynamically read or generated data (from a database for example).

Here is a code sample from the idbView HSP application:

Conclusion

As you can see, HSP programming is the same as ASP programming. The difference is, the program runs entirely on the user's machine without the use of a webserver. Using the browser as the runtime environment means that you can deploy browser applications that consist of a single, small, easy to deploy file (EzWeb Compiler content storage file) whose runtime environment is the Internet Explorer web browser.