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Embedded web server Design in the Bad Old Days

(i.e. Last Week!)

In the old way of laying out interactive content pages for your dedicated web server, you would use a regular web page design tool to lay out your content, and you'd struggle with HTML and CSS layout rules to get things looking OK. But you'd have to test your layout in many different browsers, because things don't always come out looking the same in Internet Explorer 6 as they do in, say, Firefox 3.0.
Then you'd have to add Javascript and Ajax to make your content interactive enough that you could use your browser to send data TO your device. And then you had to figure out how to get the data sent to your device over the web, to actually be accessable by the firmware of your device.
Our customers tell us it used to take a whole day just to light up one LED: a slow, painful experience.

The TCPmaker Way:
Design Your Content With Drag & Drop Ease

TCPmaker uses a completely different approach, that's kind of like those Visual XXX programming languages that you see for the PC.

Instead of having to treat HTML like a programming language (that you have to tweak in order to put things where you want them), TCPmaker lets simply you place attractive interactive controls on the drawing area, and arrange them with drag and drop ease. Your controls stay where you put them, with no HTML or CSS surprises.

 

Visual Page Designer

  • Define Your Variables
    Define Your Variables
  • Lay Out Controls...
    Lay Out Controls...

    ...and associate variables with them.

  • Save & Test Your Layout
    Save & Test Your Layout
  • Test In Browser
    Test In Browser
  • Exit the Visual Page Designer
    Exit the Visual Page Designer

 

 

TCPmaker 's Visual Page Designer gives you the power to create attractive, multi-page layouts containing colorful visual controls, background elements, and text.

 

Associate Variables With Controls

Setting up your interactive controls is a breeze in TCPmaker . Just select a control, and you'll see its Property Page on the left, where you can set the properties of the control.

 

Associate Variables with Controls

For those controls that can either set data that then needs to be sent to the PIC device, OR that can display data that has been sent from the PIC device, the hookup of data item to control is very simple:

 

 

Read more about: Associating variables with controls >>

 

Test The Final Layout Before It's Final

TCPmaker's Visual Page Designer gives you a lot of "How am I doing so far?" features, to help you gauge how close to being done you are, as well as to head off problems while it's easy to fix them.

Chief among these features is that TCPmaker lets you test your layout in the browser, right on your PC, before you even program your project into your PIC device. This lets you:

Based on what you found in your test, you can make changes and test again, or you can exit the Visual Page Designer and generate code. You're in complete control!

 

Set Up "Submit Groups"

Most of TCPmaker 's screen controls send their data to your device as soon as the control is clicked or dragged, which can be great for making immediate changes to individual settings, like turning on a motor right away.

But some things you may need to do require you to set several parameters first. Then, only after all the parameters have been set correctly (and consistently with each other), do you want to actually trigger the action.

An example of this is the process of changing the network address of your device, over the network. You access the device on the network by pointing your browser to its existing network address. Then, you access a password protected page of your TCPmaker layout that contains Input String (Is) controls, into which you enter the new network address parameters, which might include a new IP address, MAC address, and so on. Then, only when all those parameters have been entered correctly, you click one button to make the change, and then point your browser to the new address of your device.

TCPmaker lets you do that with Submit Groups. By creating a Submit Group, the actual processing of the data from all the controls in the group gets delayed until the "submit" button is pressed. The Is control has special properties to let you light up your display when the user has changed the string, to remind the user needs to actually click the submit button to make the change take effect.

 

SubmitGroupDirtyAnnotated

 

Use Reports to See How Close You Are To Being Done

The Visual Page Designer provides helpful Reports about your project. These reports list the variables, controls, and pages that you have defined thus far, and the relationships between them.

You can get reports like these:

and several other report types.

These reports can help you see how close your design is to being done. They help you answer questions like these:

 

All This Content Takes Very Little Storage on Your PIC Micro

TCPmaker Pro gives you all these great capabilities because it does things in a brand new way. To help you see what we mean, let's compare the old way of doing things with the TCPmaker way.

The OLD WAY Of Making Embedded web server Content: HTML, CSS, AJAX

OldHTML_not

 

The old way of making interactive content on Embedded web server devices used HTML and AJAX, a Javascript technology that works differently on different web browsers. That approach suffers from a lot of problems:

 

The TCPmaker Way: Drag-and-Drop Flash-Based Interactive Controls

A TCPmaker demo

The TCPmaker Way uses Adobe Flash to provide great-looking interactive web controls that react quickly and look right in all browers. Adobe Flash comes pre-installed in all new PCs, and is already installed on 95% of all PCs in the world.

Next: Dress It Up >>

 

 

Being able to use beautiful 3-D looking screen controls like buttons, sliders, gauges, and graphs, makes TCPmaker a joy to use.

 

There is no easier or faster way on the planet than TCPmaker, to make embedded web servers that look great, are highly interactive, and work in a wide variety of PIC microcontrollers. Gets your project up and running fast!

 

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