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A Quick Note About Using a Proper Editor with Webbatch

Before you begin to write your first WebBatch program, while it is true that you can use any text
editor you wish, I highly recommend you use the included editor, WinBatch Studio, that
came with your purchase to create and modify WebBatch scripts. WinBatch Studio will color
your source code based on recognized syntax and makes it much easier to program in, rather
then something like Notepad. WinBatch Studio, comes with the free copy of WinBatch that you
received with WebBatch. Simply install WinBatch and WinBatch Studio will install itself.

Your first WebBatch Program, Displaying the Current Time on a Web page

I thought to start us off, I would pick something simple, yet demonstrates the concepts behind
WebBatch. Let's say you wanted to have WebBatch that you wanted to display on the page the
time the page was queried. Simply using static HTML pages alone, you would not be able to
achieve this. Below is the WebBatch code which will output the current time each and every
time the page is queried :

; WhatTimeIsIt.web
; our first WebBatch program

webout('Content-type: text/html',2)
webout('<html>',1)
webout('<head>',1)
webout('<title>What Time Is It?</title>',1)
webout('</head>',1)
webout('<body>',1)
Now=TimeDate()
webout('The current date and time is : %Now%',1)
webout('</body>',1)
webout('</html>',1)

With the code complete and stored in the c:\program files\webbatch\WhatTimeIsIt we are
ready to use a browser to access the file. One thing to note here however is that all your
WebBatch scripts need to be stored under the c:\program files\webbatch folder. You can store
your .web files in seperate folders or simply stand alone .web files, however everything must
reside under the master WebBatch folder within program files.

Now to run the WhatTimeIsIt.web file, type the following in the browser on the server :

http://localhost/webcgi/webbatch.exe?WhatTimeIsIt/WhatTimeIsIt.web

What this is doing is that your browser is called webbatch.exe on the server and you are telling
webbatch.exe to run the .web file located in a folder called WhatTimeIsIt and a file within that
folder called WhatTimeIsIt.web. Webbatch.exe parses/reads the .web file and dynamically
displays the output in the form of HTML (DHTML). Let's examine the code a bit closer to
understand what webbatch.exe is outputting :

; WhatTimeIsIt.web
; our first WebBatch program

The above code are comments noted by the ;

webout('Content-type: text/html',2)
webout('<html>',1)
webout('<head>',1)
webout('<title>What Time Is It?</title>',1)
webout('</head>',1)
webout('<body>',1)

Standard HTML being printed to the browser. Webbatch.exe notices the command
webout and immediately outputs whatever is located between " ". As you can see the
contents within " " this is standard HTML that is generally seen at the top of HTML
documents

Now=TimeDate()

A user defined variable called Now has been assigned the value of the function
TimeDate(). Nothing is outputed to the browser by this command. Simply the user
defined variable Now gets the value returned by calling the TimeDate() function.

webout('The current date and time is : %Now%',1)

With the variable Now storing the value of TimeDate, I would like to have it display its
contents. I use the webout command, and the words The current date and time is get
presented to the browser and the value of Now is outputed. When you want to output
the contents of a variable in a Webout statement, simply enclose it between a pair of
%, such as displayed with the Now

webout('</body>',1)
webout('</html>',1)

Again Standard HTML code that you would see at the end of an HTML document.

The neat thing here. is that given this script is run each time the URL is requested, the value of
Now changes with each request, causing a new update paged to be generated with a new
value for the date and time. What does that make? Dynamic HTML !