Chapter 6: Getting User Input

Overview

WEB APPLICATIONS HAVE ADVANCED quite a bit in recent years . Although early attempts were purely informational (providing a magazine-style experience), modern Web applications are expected to be fully interactive. In fact, for many traditional, rich client applications where installation was difficult and time-consuming , distribution over the Web has become the perfect mechanism for reducing costs.

Therefore, it isn t surprising that simplifying the retrieval and usage of user input was a key design goal in ATL Server. To meet this goal, ATL Server provides an extensive framework that allows you to easily obtain, validate, and convert your user s input into specified data types. This framework is easily extensible, so you can customize it for your specific needs. Also, you can bypass the higher-level features of this framework, if necessary, and access your users data in its raw format.

We start this chapter by looking at how the user will send data to your Web application.