Direct to Web is a system for creating Web applications that access a database. All Direct to Web needs to create the application is a model of the database, which you can build using EOModeler (a data-modeling application).
Direct to Web uses information from a data model to dynamically generate Web pages. Consequently, you can modify your application’s configuration at runtime—using the Web Assistant—to hide objects of a particular class, hide their properties, reorder properties, and change the way they are displayed without recompiling or relaunching the application.
Out of the box, Direct to Web generates Web pages for nine common database tasks, including querying, editing, and listing. To do this, Direct to Web uses a task-specific component called a template that can perform the task on any entity. The templates, in conjunction with a set of rules (which you can customize), are the essential elements of a Direct to Web application.
A Direct to Web application is highly customizable. For example, you can change the appearance of the standard templates, mix Web components with Web pages generated by Direct to Web, and create custom Web components and Direct to Web templates that implement specialized behavior.
For more information on Direct to Web, see “The Direct to Web Approach”.