Benefit: Variable Output Formats

When designing a new application, you usually need to define an output format that the application uses to respond to a query. E.g. an application developed as interactive browser application for HTML is usually not able to generate any other output format.

Widespread Limitation

This limitation is based on the fact that most of the more common development frameworks only offer reasonable support of one direct output channel. If for example you want to make an HTML application accessible by WAP or offer the HTML output of an invoice as PDF as well, this requires quite some manual effort.

Flexible Output

Variable Output Formats

For applications developed on the zen Platform, a different output format can be dynamically set for any request. Currently, the platform directly supports inter alia XML, HTML, TEXT, WML(WAP), and PDF. This way the output of an application can be automatically transformed into any number of target formats, without having to modify the core of the application. The output formats can be extended as you like.

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