Jim Gallagher wrote:

<< Well, not as expected.  The whole reason I was running it outside of the ide was to test how it worked.  I thought that perhaps the WB server was doing the web service call under the covers and returning, over http, the result to the client.  I was reading tea leaves in this, from the manual:
I see that it is the browser client that is making the request, and I can understand why this would be a security problem. I don't mean this as a criticism of the way it works - I'm just trying to get my bearings. I'm finding Web Builder to be pretty amazing.
>>

Yes - this is one of the things that's important to understand from EWB - the "EWB app runs fully in the browser" and has no dependency on the web server at all (meaning from getting it up and running - it might need to use web server services though so see below). This also means that you can load it from any web server - apache, iis,mongoose, etc and it will work the same. Contrast this things like ASP/PHP which run on server - in real world you'd mix the 2 though - use the EWB in browser and server side language (PHP or delphi server) on back-end server side.

The "only" communication mechanism is the HTTP request (normally GET or POST) and this is where the web server comes into play - it would need to know how to handle the request. EWB web server "knows" how to handle datasets (and DBISAM and EDB natively) but if you wish you can write your own server side in any language you want using any technology you want - there is no dependency beyond agreed protocol  (i.e. JSON and EWB dataset model ).

If you do wish to use the Dataset capability built into EWB then server needs to talk the JSON that EWB specifies. However you'er welcome to do your own data formats and parsing etc - you just have to write both server side and EWB result parsing yourself.

If you wanted to achieve the "server asking for time on behalf of EWB app" you'd need to implement a server side function to achieve this so the overall interaction would be
1. EWB APP connects to your server asking for time
2. Your server connects to time server and retrieves time
3. your server now returns the request in the response from request from point 1 above

Obviously for time this would be an overkill but getting DB data works exactly the same - basically your server needs to handle the request on behalf of ewb app.

Raul