Product Review:
PPWizard (HTML Preprocessor)

David Mertz, Ph.D.
Gnosis Software, Inc.
June 2000

At A Glance

Creator: Dennis Bareis <[email protected]> Price/License: Free of cost, with a simple license statment prohibiting sale or breaking up the distribution. Home Page: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dbareis/ppwizard.htm Requirements: System with REXX interpreter

What Is Ppwizard?

PPWizard is a text "preprocessor" written in REXX. A special emphasis is made by PPWizard to process for HTML output (lots of handy HTML-related functions come with it); but strictly speaking you can use PPWizard for most any output format.

A preprocessor is a great thing to use when you want to generate a site worth of consistent-looking pages. Rather than having to copy-and-paste things like navigation bars, site-titles, color and background definitions, with a preprocessor you can give a simple name to a whole bunch of HTML; and changing it in one place will change it everywhere.

What a preprocessor actually does is read a source file that consists of some literal text with some directives, and create output according to the directives. In the case of PPWizard, the directives can range from some predefined high-level macros to your own embedded code.

PPWizard is probably the most powerful and well designed preprocessor you can get. And like so much good software, it's free. PPWizard is not a tool that completely holds your hand: you need to remember some macro names and keep in mind what you are doing. But anyone who has written a little program code, or even hand-coded HTML, should have no trouble with the skill-level needed by PPWizard. Quite a bit can be done with PPWizard's predefined macros; and for those requiring more, there is room to grow by programming directives in actual REXX (it is an easy language to work with). One can even process HTML pages based on database queries, or on the results of other programs you might use.

A word on REXX: Users of IBM operating systems (plus AmigaOS) will be familiar with the REXX scripting language that comes with their OS. For other developers, however, a free REXX interpreter is available called Regina; Regina can be found athttp://www.lightlink.com/hessling/Regina/index.html. Precompiled binaries can be downloaded for most common operating systems (even, for example, BeOS and QNX), and source code is available for any others.

Ppwizard Versus Server-side Includes

Apache's server-side includes (SSI) are a handy tool for including common-content across a number of web-pages (often for site consistency). PPWizard is much like a greatly enhanced SSI mechanism. In much the same style as SSI, a PPWizard source file is a bunch of instructions about what to include in a given web page. But PPWizard goes a lot farther than SSI does. You can include content conditionally on a calculation or another program step (are certain files in a directory, what's the date, how does an SQL query do, etc); you can write values into the file that depend on program steps, rather than just another file's contents; you can generate a whole site worth of files rather than just the one being delivered.

The site issue draws another contrast. PPWizard is primarily useful as a batch tool for regenerating a site. It is not firstly designed for dynamic page delivery. You might generate a PPWizard site every night--as a cron job, for example--but if your site content changes from minute to minute, PPWizard is not really the best tool. You could install PPWizard on your server, and create a wrapper for generation of pages by PPWizard. That would not be hard to do, but it is also not really the target usage of PPWizard: REXX is not as fast as Perl or Python (let alone C), and there is nothing like mod_perl or mod_php to speed things up. On the plus side, if you have a site that is the type you only need to change intermittently, batch processing with PPWizard avoids any extra server load imposed by SSI or CGI-like techniques.

Ppwizard Versus Server-side Scripting

PPWizard is also comparable to server-side scripting tools like PHP or ASP. REXX has a similar power and expressiveness to PHP, ColdFusion, or VBScript (but programmer tastes differ, of course). PPWizard source files look less like "HTML files with extra bits" than they do like "Include files with bits of HTML." But that is a small difference once you are used to one thing or another. Both the pros and cons of batch versus dynamic are increased when thinking of server-side scripting (vs. SSI). Scripts demand more server resources, but can also be more dynamic, than SSI. PPWizard gives you the sophisticated processing of server-side scripts, but the batch mode reduces the server utilization to static-page requirements.

PPWizard arguably makes it easier to create consistent site features and appearance than one gets with PHP, mod_perl, ASP, ColdFusion, or the like. PPWizard templates are flexible and can be nested hierarchically. A change one place very easily propogates consistently. PPWizard's source file structure puts a clear focus on the conditional and common elements of pages, and the files are easy to update and maintain. Overall, PPWizard is the best tool the author has found for creating consistent, mostly-static sites.

About The Author

David Mertz dabbles in a lot of things. Lately, he has mostly done web-application development and writing articles like this. You can find out copious biographical details by rooting around athttp://gnosis.cx/publish/.