Web Administrators ISPG Perspective

The curent server version of ISPG can be used on computers running Microsoft IIS 6.0 or later, such as Windows 2003 server. The IDE has an internal web server, used for debugging and layout editing mode (WYSIWYG), and runs on Windows XP or later.

To use ISPG, IIS must be configured to allow handling of .ispg resource requests using IspgSite.dll, an ISAPI extension. The web sites using ISPG must be configured to serve .ispg requests using the above mentioned ISAPI extension.

Since the web server should store only compiled .ispg files, the web site should be configured not to check resource file existance. The page will actually be built using compiled .ispg and .icod files, with extensions .hexb and .hexc. ISPG may also be instructed to use URL Rewrite, and the actual folder containing the .hexb and .hexc files can be determined dynamically, another reason why IIS should not check file existance, and let ISPG handle the task.

If the web site uses some form of ISPG authentification and authorization for static resources other than .ispg (such as .html document or .jpg image files), IIS should be configured to wildcard direct all requests to ISPG, which will first check if the request is granted access to that document, then serve the static document.

A detailed description of ISPG configuration parameters, gathered in the web site configuration file (with extension .prj), is available in the ISPG Manual.

ISPG web sites can be configured to maximize sharing of resources on the IIS server in two ways:

• Web sites built using same third-party solutions may share a common set of read-only files, from the same vendor.
• Web applications loaded in the same application pool can share common cached resources.

ISPG can be configured to accept alternate extensions, handling them as .ispg resource requests. This can be useful if the web hosting plan does not offer the possiblity to change IIS settings directly. If the hosting plan supports .NET web applications, a .NET web application can redirect requests of .ashx resources to ISPG for final handling. The web site will use .ashx instead of .ispg. The ISPG IDE project must declare .ashx as an alternate extension for ispg, so that normal editing or debugging can be done.