Conclusion

To effectively interact with a Web application, either query strings or form data (or both) must be supported on the server side. Both of these techniques present the data in the same style (i.e., name /value pairs). However, this simplicity is hidden from developers due to the fact that all data is returned by IIS as one giant string that must be parsed.

ATL Server alleviates developers problems by providing functionality that allows them to easily look through the data to find what theyre looking for (either by looping through all the data or by looking up specific name/value pairs).

To make this data more usable, ATL Server provides additional functionality in the form of validation and exchange. The validation of the data ensures that it matches a given pattern and is of a given size . This helps quickly ensure that the data returned was valid, and it also helps prevent developers from suffering from buffer overruns caused by user input (the most dangerous kind of buffer overrun ).

The exchange functionality is designed to make using the data returned by the user easy to process. To do this, the data must be copied into variables in the developers code. This functionality and the appropriate data conversions are all provided by ATL Server.

Now that you have a good understanding about how to get input from your perspective users, in the next chapter youll take a look at what you have to do to deploy your ATL Server application manually.