Online versus Offline
You'll hear a lot about online versus offline generation of
Generator templates. So what's the difference? When you are using
Generator templates online, the server is creating a new file every
time someone browses to the HTML page in which the template is
embedded. If you have Generator 2 Enterprise Edition, you can set
up caching features to save wear and tear on your server. However,
if you are using Generator Developer Edition, a new file is created
for every request of the template. The important distinction here
is that the file did not exist prior to the request for it.
Online generation is a Web server extension. It enables dynamic
combinations of text, graphics, and sound into rich media. When a
browser
requests
a Generator template from the Web server, the Web
server
passes
the request to Generator by way of an instance of a
Java servlet. Data is
acquired
from the data sources. The template
and data are passed to the C++ code, which merges them and builds
the image.
If your data does not need to be updated in real time, you can
run your templates offline to create Flash Player movies, GIFs,
JPEGs, and so on and manually replace the files on the server only
when there are changes to the data.
Offline generation can be done in two different ways. Flash 5
includes a version of the Generator server. Every time you publish
a Generator template from the Flash authoring environment, you are
invoking an offline generation.
Offline generation also can be done at the command-line level if
you have the Generator server extensions installed. Instead of
sending a file back to a browser, offline generation creates a
physical file in the format
requested
and saves it to a hard
drive.
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